Jewish rainbow

When I walk into a room and say to people I meet "I'm Jewish" often I will get the response "But you're Black." I often want to say "no kidding," but the usual response I give is "Yes, my family has been practicing Judaism for at least three generations, now." The point that I aim to make is that it would make it easier to just "BE" as a Jewish person of color if "black" and "Jewish" identity were not so commonly assumed to be mutually exclusive. Historically, Jews have been multiple skin colors and it's unfortunate that the passive internalization of color consciousness that happens so easily in American society, helped us to forget the freedom from identifying around color that is a part of our Jewish history. (p. 27)

The above quote comes from Yavilah McCoy, as recorded in a fascinating book I just read, Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz's The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism. Designed to raise awareness about Jews of color, the book presents numerous anecdotes about the experiences of nonwhite Jews, followed by stimulating discussions on the implications of this research. The book is marred for me by its anti-Zionist standpoint, which culminates in a final chapter that has very little to do with the rest of the book. The back cover sports endorsements by Tony Kushner, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Adrienne Rich, all left-wing thinkers squarely in Kantrowitz's ideological camp. I get the sense that Kantrowitz underestimates her audience, thinking that her discussions about racial diversity in the Jewish community either will appeal only to those with her positions or will inevitably move readers toward those positions. Instead, her dogmatic advocacy of ideas that most Jews find offensive will likely turn away many readers who would otherwise find much value in the information she presents.

What types of nonwhite Jews are there? The question is not as easy to answer as one might expect, because it depends on how one defines "white" and "Jewish," both highly contested categories. Most Americans today assume that the prototypical Jew (which usually means Ashkenazic Jew) is white, but that was not always the common perception in this country. The very act of designating Jews as white or nonwhite can be a political statement, because it is taken to suggest something about their status and position in society. (I have known Jews who mark themselves as "other" in forms asking for their race.)

With these precautions in mind, Kantrowitz considers several types of people: (1) African American and Asian American converts to Judaism (2) nonwhite children adopted by Jewish families (3) children of mixed marriages (4) Ethiopian Jews and other black African communities that have practiced Judaism for centuries or more (5) the most ambiguous category, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, some of them quite dark-skinned, others scarcely distinguishable from their Ashkenazic brethren.

One reason this information has value is that Jews, despite a long history of crucial involvement in the civil rights movement, also have a history of racism that persists today in some religious communities. The historical tension between Ashkenazim and Sephardim can take on racial overtones. More pertinently, many Jews have trouble accepting the very concept of a black Jew--it seems an impossibility, a contradiction in terms.

One anecdote really struck home for me, reflecting the type of compartmentalized behavior I've witnessed. McCoy, the woman I quoted before, attended a Hasidic school as a child. On one occasion when she complained to classmates who were denigrating non-Jewish blacks, they assured her they weren't talking about her. The inconsistent thinking required to sustain this kind of attitude demonstrates why Jews of color may help stem the tides of bigotry coming from both Jews and non-Jews.

Kantrowitz wishes to uproot the perception that "black" and "Jewish" are mutually exclusive categories, and to reveal the Jewish people as a racially diverse group. She feels that recognizing this reality will ease the tension between Jews and blacks. Her point is that if the two categories can overlap, people will be less inclined to view the two groups as enemies of each other.

She weakens her argument, however, by trying to downplay the well-documented fact that a disproportionate level of anti-Semitism exists among African Americans. She fails to discuss any of the official studies, such as Harris Polls taken over the last several decades. As Charles Silberman noted in his book A Certain People, black anti-Semitism is not a mirror image of Jewish racism. The latter is far more marginalized in the Jewish community than the former is in the African American community. The problem is not that most blacks agree with Louis Farrakhan's anti-Semitic pronouncements, but that leaders like him exhibit far greater influence than any comparably racist figure in the Jewish community.

She also wishes to blur the line between "Jew" and "Arab" by emphasizing the strong Arab element of Jews who are the product of Arabic land, culture, and language as surely as American Jews are Americans. She eagerly embraces the term "Arab Jew" to highlight this dual identity.

She correctly observes that Islamic countries in the Middle Ages generally treated Jews far better than Christian countries from the same era did. The height of this relatively peaceful coexistence occurred in the Golden Age of Spain from the eighth to twelfth centuries. But the picture is more complicated than she would like to believe. This period, when Jews enjoyed more rights and privileges than any time until the modern age, ended not because of the fifteenth-century Christian rulers who instigated the Inquisition, but because of violent Muslim invaders from two centuries earlier.

In addressing this fact, Kantrowitz performs a remarkable sleight of hand. She quotes Victor Perera saying, "[u]ntil the arrival of bloody-minded Almohade Berbers in 1146, bent on implanting Islam in all of Europe, Spain's Jews generally lived at peace with Muslim rulers and their Christian subjects; and they thrived culturally and commercially as never before or since" (p. 81). She immediately comments, "This peace persisted until the Christian conquest of Iberia and the Inquisition," which is not only false, but directly contradicts what she just quoted!

The final chapter of the book is little more than an essay on forging a Jewish identity apart from Zionism. Too bad. There is considerable merit to her thesis that recognizing racial diversity among Jews will help improve relations with other people. She doesn't seem to accept, or even consider, that Jews can support Israel and still be fully committed to peaceful relations with non-Jews. I hope that intelligent readers will be able to overlook the book's flaws, because beneath the rhetoric lies some valuable material about forgotten portions of world Jewry.

Ethnic time

One night when I worried I would show up late for a Talmud class, I joked to a friend, "I wouldn't want them to think I'm Jewish."

That quip was just a variation on a common Jewish theme. If a meeting will take place at "8:00, Jewish time," what this means is that it's scheduled for eight but will likely begin at least fifteen minutes later. Only a Yekke (an affectionately derogatory term for a German Jew) would arrive on the dot.

I assumed that this concept was uniquely Jewish. It seemed to fit my image of the absentminded Jewish thinker, best exemplified in a novelty item I once saw in a catalog, the "relative time watch," featuring a picture of Einstein surrounded by the numbers "1ish, 2ish, 3ish...." (Wait, wasn't Einstein a Yekke?!)

But then one day I was talking to a black friend and learned about a similar concept called C.P. time. "What does C.P. stand for?" I asked stupidly. Uh...colored people. I was a little taken aback. I later saw Dave Barry talk about a Cuban sense of time (because his wife and in-laws are Cuban). According to Barry:

If a WASP wedding is scheduled to start at 2 p.m. Saturday, the wedding march will start at 2 p.m. sharp, and the bride will come down the aisle at 2:03 p.m., no matter what, even if the originally scheduled groom has bailed out and the bride has to use an emergency backup groom taken right off the street.

Whereas in a typical Cuban wedding, the phrase "2 p.m." is translated as "possibly this weekend." (True fact: I once went to a wedding at a Cuban home; I arrived 20 minutes before the scheduled start, and was greeted at the door by the bride, who was still in curlers.) I believe that the Cuban community will not be affected by the Millennium Bug until the year 2004 at the earliest.

I was a little surprised by this column, since Barry usually avoids edgy, politically incorrect humor. It turns out that his wife is actually a Cuban Jew. Put together, that means she won't be experiencing the Millennium Bug until 2008.

You'd think that ethnic stereotypes would have no place in modern discourse, but many people seem more than eager to embrace stereotypes of their own group (or their spouse's). And not just positive stereotypes, like "Jews are smart," but seemingly negative ones, like having a loose sense of time. It gives minorities a warm, intimate feeling that sets them apart from their more fastidious WASP neighbors.

Of course, whether a stereotype is positive or negative depends on perspective. Republican presidential candidate Tommy Thompson got himself in a little trouble a few months ago when he characterized great business acumen as one of the "accomplishments of the Jewish religion." Jews didn't take to that remark very well, but he meant it as a compliment.

Thompson was confusing the religious tradition with the sociological reality. The Jewish religion has much to say about philanthropy and ethics, but very little about financial know-how. The stereotype of the financially astute Jew goes back to the Middle Ages, when Jews became moneylenders after the Church barred them from most other occupations.

Because this stereotype has been the source of so many slanderous beliefs, such as the claim that Jews are greedy, most Jews feel uncomfortable at any reference to a connection between Jewishness and money. But they seem not to mind other stereotypes. The expression "For every two Jews, there are three opinions" was almost certainly invented by a Jew. Then there are all the traits associated with Jewish mothers.

People say that stereotypes usually have basis in truth, but that's a dangerous observation, easy to misunderstand. Lacking a strong inside knowledge of a group's history, one can have a hard time telling truth apart from myth. A good synonym for stereotype is "caricature." Maybe that's why people are more comfortable poking fun at their own group than someone else's: the closer you are to the target, the more you understand how to attack it sensitively.

The cage of language

One of the labels I frequently attach to my posts is "power of words." I believe that words do have power. Our whole life, after all, is shaped by language. Few if any of us remember before we learned to speak, and we probably cannot even conceive of the experience. If language is a vessel for thoughts, it is one that transforms what is inside of it.

One person who truly understood this point was George Orwell, who explained his views most forcefully in "Politics and the English Language." Many people have read this wonderful essay, and many more are at least passingly familiar with Orwell's ideas. But not everyone fully grasps what he was talking about. Ironically, people today who throw around the word Orwellian are usually falling into the very trap Orwell warned against: the use of hackneyed but politically charged terms to mask lazy thinking.

Bemoaning the decline of the English language, the beginning of Orwell's essay almost sounds like it's going to be a tired old trope about the misuse of grammar. But those who read further will discover a far more distinctive argument. Indeed, one of the examples that Orwell cites of bad writing is itself a critique of grammar-related sins, an issue to which Orwell seems indifferent. The writing issues that concern Orwell are wordiness, triteness, and vagueness.

I have observed that people have three levels for understanding Orwell's critique. Level One readers interpret it simply as a call to communicate more effectively. Strunk & White's popular style manual, for example, eagerly seizes upon Orwell's humorous "translation" of Ecclesiastes 9:11 into dry academic prose: "Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

Level Two readers understand that the bad communication cited by Orwell serves a definite purpose, as the people in power try to confuse the masses. This is the most popular conception of Orwell's ideas, the kind that shows up whenever someone rallies against "doublespeak," a term that Orwell did not actually invent.

Level Three readers correctly identify the core of Orwell's message: if we don't exercise control over the language, then the language will exercise control over us. Bad communication is not merely a conscious process designed to keep the masses in line. It is something that we blind ourselves with.

What would Orwell say about the current political climate if he were alive today? Conservatives speculate that he would attack political correctness. There is definitely an element of doublespeak in PC terminology, not just because of oversensitivity but also because of the way it implicitly excludes some views from discussion.

But what many conservatives fail to acknowledge is that overuse of the phrase politically correct has itself become an Orwellian tactic. In the culture at large, the phrase has practically lost its political implications. It is simply a synonym for "polite," but with negative connotations.

I once was reading a blog discussion where a guy referred to the author of some book as an idiot. Another guy said he agreed with the criticism but added that there was no need to launch ad hominem attacks against the author. The first guy came back and retorted, "Oh, don't be so PC." This discussion, I should note, had nothing to do with politics.

What PC means, to most people, is "avoiding saying what you mean for fear of offending someone." People use the expression so that they don't have to take responsibility for their words. It gives people the license to be as offensive as they want and then make it sound as if anyone who disagrees is being namby-pamby. The elder Bush once described political correctness as something that began as "a crusade for civility" and turned into "Orwellian...crusades that demand correct behavior." I would describe the backlash against political correctness as something that began as a crusade against censorship and turned into an all-purpose excuse for poor decorum.

Orwell did not direct his criticisms against any one party or philosophy. He realized that the problem was almost universal: "Political language--and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Properly, Orwell's critique should be used for reflection, not just condemnation. We need to consider how we communicate, not just how others do. No one escapes the cage of language; the best we can do is be conscious of how it surrounds us.

The myth of the fantasy genre

Sometimes viewpoints that are dead wrong can provide a starting point for insightful discussions. I feel that way about Christian opponents of the Harry Potter series. They think it's bad to expose children to stories depicting witchcraft in a positive light. Fans respond that Harry Potter is fantasy, and that these books are a healthy tool for stimulating a child's imagination.

"Fantasy" is a funny name for a genre. The word suggests make-believe. All fiction is make-believe, but fantasy deals specifically with events that not only didn't happen, but couldn't happen. We, the readers, allow our minds to enter a universe that we know could never exist. The books tap into some part of our subconscious where rationality has not penetrated, and for a brief period of time we "believe" in magic. The genre is not about exploring possibilities, as science fiction does, but about losing ourselves in impossibilities. As Orson Scott Card puts it in his 1990 book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, "science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be" (p. 22).

But that raises a problem. If we designate all supernatural stories as fantasy, as is the common practice, we're implying that there's no such thing as the supernatural. I presume that Card, as a Mormon, would resist that implication. Yet he doesn't appear bothered by it: "As rational people, we know that magic doesn't work and superstitions are meaningless" (p. 22). True, but what about the miracles of the Bible? What about God and the afterlife?

The fantasy genre avoids this dilemma because it rarely deals with religion. Magic may be rooted in pagan belief, but most fantasies do not feature pagan deities. Two important pioneers of the genre--J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis--were devout Christians. (J.K. Rowling is, too, but let that pass.) I once saw someone make the following clueless remark about Harry Potter: "Why do the kids celebrate Christmas if they practice witchcraft?" But that's just the point. The magic in Harry Potter isn't a religion; it is an alternative series of natural laws. It has about as much to do with ancient occult practice as Westerns have to do with the real Old West. And it has about as much to do with Satan worship as armadillos have to do with Swiss cheese.

The fantasy genre, in any case, centers on things that almost everyone agrees are imaginary, like elves and dragons. Religiously rooted supernatural fiction, like The Exorcist, usually ends up in the horror section of a bookstore. People may call it fantasy, but that's not the publishing category. Fantasy, despite its religious origins, is essentially a very secular genre. Individual works like C.S. Lewis's Narnia series may express religious ideas, but mostly through metaphor.

Does a book even need magic to be considered fantasy? The Princess Bride has no obvious magical elements, unless you consider a volcanic swamp populated by ferocious capybaras to be magical. As for Miracle Max, he's an herbalist, not a sorcerer, and he doesn't show up until quite late in the story. Yet everybody thinks of The Princess Bride as a fantasy, largely because it has all the trappings of one.

The matter gets even fuzzier with books that deal with the afterlife, like Richard Matheson's What Dreams May Come, which I discussed in a previous post. Wikipedia classifies such novels as "bangsian fantasy," after an author named John Kendrick Bangs. But the thing is, Matheson actually believed in what he wrote. He based his depiction of afterlife on extensive research into near-death experiences and the visions of mystics. To him, and to many readers, his book is surely not "fantasy."

Card hints that the genre designation does have something to do with what people actually believe about the world. For example, are The Iliad and The Odyssey fantasies? No, says Card, because they were written at a time when most people believed in such stuff. What about the Bible or Paradise Lost? Card prudently remarks that even today many people "would be outraged to hear of either being classified as fantasy" (p. 18).

Even science fiction isn't immune to this dilemma. I have heard George Lucas described as a "modern mythmaker." But myths are what a culture actually believes in. People do not go to Star Wars to see a world they believe is real. Rather, Lucas takes the myths of the past and spins them into entertainment which modern audiences accept on a purely symbolic level. In a sense, that's what all fantasy writers do. If we could see what future societies will think of our own, we might be surprised at what they consider our myths and our fantasies.

Clever translations

When visiting Israel a few years ago, I purchased a Modern Hebrew translation of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the fifth in the series, and the source of the latest movie). My Hebrew skills are at a level where I can understand snippets of dialogue, while having much more trouble with the general text. But what interested me was comparing it with the English version. I quickly learned that the translator must exercise some imagination in conveying ideas that can't be understood through literal translation.

The first question that occurred to me was how the translator handled puns. Because puns exploit word pairs that sound alike but have different meanings, they usually are language-specific. Therefore, they cannot be translated directly. Take the following passage from Chapter Seven:

"And don't take too long, Weasley, the delay on that firelegs report held our investigation up for a month."

"If you had read my report you would know that the term is 'firearms,'" said Mr. Weasley coolly.

This exchange depends on the double meaning of arms. Unfortunately, Hebrew has no word that means both weapons and limbs. What the translation does is make Mr. Weasley's report about ekdichay yad (אקדחי יד), or handguns, and the confused wizard calls them ekdichay regel (אקדחי רגל): "footguns." This gets the same point across as in the original--the wizard's ignorance of technology--and creates an equally outlandish image. But it doesn't involve the same level of wordplay.

In other instances, the translation does manage to retain the wordplay of the original book. For example, in the English version Hermione starts a club called Society for the Promotion of Elf Welfare, or S.P.E.W. The Hebrew translation gets lucky on this one, rendering the club's name almost word for word, with the resulting acronym sounding very close to the the Hebrew word for "allergy"!

At least the Hebrew version preserves most of the character names from the original. Many other Harry Potter translations don't. When I posted the "footguns" example on a language list, someone wrote back to me that the Norwegian version changes Dumbledore's name to Humlesnurr. The reason given is that the name Dumbledore comes from a British dialect word for "bumblebee," and humle is Norwegian for "bumblebee," while snurr means "to whirr."

I have no idea how often translators find sensible solutions to these kinds of problems. Puns and wordplay are only the beginning of the challenges. Good translations stand on their own as works in their own right. But they may overstep their boundaries by improving on the original work. One Israeli teenager told Haaretz that he considers the Hebrew version of Order of the Phoenix superior to the English version. That is not necessarily a compliment.

I post, therefore I am

You're walking down the street, and a scrawny young man approaches you. He has acne and wears braces. He can't be more than seventeen. He says to you, "I'm George, a 52-year-old surgeon." A moment later, he says, "And I'm Clara, a 26-year-old law student."

As absurd as this scenario sounds, many people are acting this way for real, not because they are psychotic, but because the Internet enables them to get away with this sort of behavior. In most online discussion areas, users can adopt whatever name they want and say just about anything without facing the consequences that would result from similar behavior in the real world. Many use this anonymity to their advantage, making up facts about themselves to intimidate others and empower themselves. They also may pretend to be more than one person by posting under more than one name. In extreme circumstances people can be traced to their real identities, but this rarely happens except when law enforcement is tracking criminals. There are other, limited ways of counteracting the problem, none of them foolproof.

It is therefore important to be cautious before accepting claims that people online make about themselves. I'm not saying that you should go around calling people liars, but you should be cognizant about the way people in Internet discussions can use their anonymity to manipulate the situation.

I have had several apparent encounters with such individuals. I say "apparent" because I never was able to prove my suspicions. The earliest was in 1997, on the Excite message boards, which happened to be my first experience with message boards. A fellow started a board entitled "HOMESCHOOLERS ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO TEACH!!!!!!"

He took every opportunity to insult anyone who challenged his views. His main argument was based on personal experience: he wrote that he knew several homeschooled children who were "all lacking in social behavior, adjusting to their surroundings and general knowledge." I asked him to clarify what exactly he had seen, pointing out that his observations may have been too limited to draw general conclusions. He replied that he had encountered numerous homeschooled kids in his jobs as an interviewer and a college instructor, and they were "all blown away by others who had attended formal education."

A fairly well-known homeschooling advocate named Karl Bunday, who has made a side career interviewing homeschooling families, joined the board and asked for permission to interview some of those kids. The person replied, "you expect me to just cough up names of my students so that some nutcase can come to their house to evaluate them?!? That is hardly confidential or professional." The question, then, was why he would base his arguments on information that others could not verify. For all we knew, he could have made it all up. Even if he hadn't, his judgment of those kids may have been less than fair. That was a distinct possibility considering how quick he was to insult complete strangers.

When I raised these points, he said that questioning his claims was unreasonable since the purpose of these boards was to "share experiences." He then attempted to put his experiences on the same level as the documented evidence of homeschooling success I had presented: "I guess I could compile my studies and call it research refuting homeschooling as being effective."

People observing the debate told me I handled myself well, but I felt I was being suckered too easily by this person's antics. He was clearly exploiting his anonymity to win the argument, by relying on "data" that could never be investigated. I acted flustered at times, and he seized on that weakness. (The good news is that I successfully changed the mind of someone else on the board, a person who actually listened to my arguments instead of just trying to fight me.)

Years later, I got a new opportunity to deal with this sort of situation. In 2005, after taking a course in which my final paper examined the movie Fight Club, I went to the Internet Movie Database's message board for that film, eager to share my insights. I soon found myself in a heated argument with two posters. If I take what they said at face value, they consisted of a middle-aged psychology professor and a young female fan. Personally, I suspect both of them were in fact one person. How do I know? I don't. I found clues, to be sure, like the fact that they frequently posted just minutes apart from each other, and that their writing styles (particularly spelling errors) were similar. But I mostly based my suspicions on my familiarity with this sort of situation.

The argument started when the "professor" posted an analysis of the protagonist's mental condition. He ridiculed all the laymen (which he spelled "laimen") who had addressed the issue. Having researched this topic, I found many errors in his post, and I pointed out that the filmmakers were themselves laymen. I hinted not too subtly that I doubted he was a real professor.

He and the "girl" erupted into insults. Here is a sample (pardon the strong language, but this is what they said): "Stop being a little bitch crying because you don't like that someone here has experience and truly knows what they're talking about." "If you ever have something to say, do yourself a favor and just shut up." "YOU were the only retard unable to comprehend me, you think it's my fault. That's your mom's fault." "Being the arrogant asshole you are, I'm sure you're not done yet, so go ahead and prove me right again by posting another whiney bitch post."

Does any of this sound like the words of a typical professor? I asked him for proof of his credentials. He replied that they had been "proven to TRUSTED people on this board, aka NOT YOU." Of course I respected his privacy; however, as long as he was flaunting his credentials, it was ridiculous that he should expect everyone to believe him without verification. Any anonymous user can claim to be a professor. It doesn't prove anything.

For a working professor, he sure seemed to spend a lot of time on the board. He had established a club called the "Space Monkeys" (modeled after the film), and board members who wanted to join he would initiate into it. He started a new thread inviting his Space Monkeys to attack me. There, they each provided me with brilliant kernels of wit, such as the following (I'm not making this up): "Kylopod is stupid and his logic is stupid and the reason he is stupid is because the opposite of smart is Kylopod." Afterwards, the "professor" praised the intelligence of these comments.

I had a chance to get angry and join in the abuse. But I decided to restrain myself from such an emotional reaction. That's one of the advantages of message boards as opposed to real-life encounters. You get some time to think before posting a reply. Here is a passage from one of my posts:

I want to thank you.

Now, I'm sure you're thinking I mean that only in a sarcastic way, and maybe you're right. But I'm actually trying to be quite honest now. I really am thankful for the insight you've provided me with your latest posts, though I realize my gratitude is of a kind that you're not likely to appreciate.

You see, I've always been fascinated by multiple-identity trolls such as yourself. What makes you tick? I've had my theories, but it's largely impossible to confirm any of them. Trolls are elusive almost by definition. All I can deduce about you is that you're pretending to be a professor, and that you are assuming at least two identities on this forum. Other than that, I know very little about you. I assume you are young, but I don't know how young--you could be anywhere from teens to twenties. Perhaps you actually are older; I really can't say for sure.

But your two latest posts have helped me understand the troll mindset better than I ever have before.

Despite his/her/their attempts to portray me as an "attacker," I adopted a cool, detached tone when replying to their rants. I acted completely unruffled by their insults. I gave the impression that I was coldly analyzing them and reacting to their attacks only with quiet amusement. As one observer put it to me in an email, "you calmly and coolly handed them their asses time and again, and you did it without swearing at them. I am humbled by your patience."

I could have simply walked away as soon as they started attacking me. That would probably have been the most sensible approach. But I've always had the weakness that I enjoy deflating bullies. In this case, I was being passive-aggressive, a quality I don't normally display in the real world. I'm usually very direct with people. But because this was a message board, I had the opportunity to try a different strategy, and I was pleased by the results.

I may have improved in my ability to handle this sort of situation, but I'm still perplexed by what it all means. I have made actual friends online. But the lack of accountability remains a problem with Internet communication. I know I'm for real, but I often cannot be sure that someone else is. There's something positively solipsistic about this situation, where the reality of everyone else's life can only be accepted on trust.

The Jurassic Park of languages

In a sociolinguistics course, I almost used that title for my final paper about the revival of Hebrew. Common sense made me reconsider. Although my teacher wasn't Jewish, I knew that some Jews take offense at the idea that Hebrew was ever an extinct language. Their attitude, ironically, leads them to overlook a remarkable Jewish achievement.

Hebrew is, put simply, the only language in history that has ever been successfully revived. This becomes clear once we understand what "revival" means. People tend to use the term somewhat loosely, applying it to movements aimed at preserving languages such as Irish, where there always have been at least a few native speakers left. And when the term is used correctly, as in the revival of Sanskrit, the movement is invariably nowhere near as successful as Modern Hebrew.

By the nineteenth century, Hebrew was not endangered but extinct, and it had been so for almost two millenia. By calling it "extinct," in no way am I trying to denigrate its central role in Judaism. On the contrary, it is a language that I myself use every day in formal prayer, as Jews have been doing throughout their entire history. But that's just the point: a purely religious language is not a living language, not in the sense that English or Spanish is.

Many people would disagree with me. William Chomsky writes, in Hebrew: The Eternal Language, "it may be safely assumed that there were always somewhere in the world, especially in Eretz Yisrael, individuals or even groups, who could and did employ the Hebrew language effectively in oral usage" (p. 218). There are various anecdotes of Jews conversing in Hebrew before the nineteenth century, such as when two Jews from faraway lands wanted to communicate and had no common vernacular. But the extent of these stories is disputed, and in any case it doesn't prove that Hebrew was a living language. Even today, there are people who can converse in Latin.

While Jews in the Middle Ages were trained from a young age to use Hebrew to a degree, it was nobody's native language. There's something special about native languages. Think about your native language. You probably can't remember ever not having spoken the language. It is so ingrained in your consciousness that it's a part of your very being. And all other languages seem like artificial systems of arbitrary sounds until you habituate yourself to them--and even then, they never feel quite as natural to you as your native tongue.

The simple fact is that Hebrew lacked that natural quality for almost the entire Diaspora. Jews studied Hebrew, prayed in Hebrew, and wrote books in Hebrew, but they did not truly speak the language except in very artificial, strained situations that rarely occurred. The revival turned it into a language that millions spoke in, thought in, and breathed in--to this day an unparalleled feat in the history of languages.

In my paper, I pondered what made this feat possible. I concluded that it depended on a whole range of factors happening simultaneously. It depended on the uncommon occurrence of a people who maintained a sense of unity for thousands of years while being scattered across the globe. It depended on their desire for a homeland, and their finding a place fertile for the creation of a new national tongue. It depended on Hebrew being their only common language. It depended on the dedication of a particular man who called himself Eliezer Ben Yehuda, and who was probably a little nuts.

What he did to bring Modern Hebrew to fruition has entered the lore of Jewish culture. He and his wife raised their son in total isolation, so that the child would be exposed to no language except Hebrew. If a non-Hebrew-speaking visitor arrived, Ben Yehuda would send the child to bed. When he came home one day to find his wife singing in Russian, he lost his temper. He even avoided having the child hear bird chirps and other animal sounds! Out of all this lunacy, the child became the world's first native speaker of Modern Hebrew.

One of the main sources I used for this information was Jack Fellman's 1973 book The Revival of a Classical Tongue. Fellman argued that Ben Yehuda's role in the revival has been overstated in popular treatments. Personally, I think Fellman's account proved just the opposite. It's true that Ben Yehuda couldn't have done it all on his own. Even after the experiment with his child, much work remained to turn Hebrew into a full modern language. But just the example he set had a huge impact on the movement. Of course, it raises significant ethical questions about language revival.

One of the problems facing the new language was that it lacked words for modern concepts. According to Fellman, Ben Yehuda sometimes had to rely on gestures and vague statements like "Take such and such...and bring me this and this, and I will drink" (p. 38). When Modern Hebrew took off in the populace, it borrowed wholesale from Arabic, English, and several other sources to enrich its vocabulary.

Nowadays, around five million people use Hebrew as their main language. As an American Jew who was taught Hebrew as a formal, religious language, I always get a weird feeling listening to Israelis use it so casually. To me, the word bitachon (ביטחון) refers to a spiritual concept meaning "trust"; it was odd to visit Israel and see that word printed on the backs of security personnel. I still can't wrap my mind around the idea that even criminals and street kids speak this language that a small group of scholars reconstructed from a holy tongue less than two centuries ago. As Robert St. John put it in Tongue of the Prophets, Ben Yehuda "made it possible for several million people to order groceries, drive cattle, make love, and curse out their neighbors in a language which until his day had been fit only for Talmudic argument and prayer" (pp. 11-12). Whether you consider the feat good or bad, it certainly is incredible.

Language observant

In 2000, Larry King asked Joe Lieberman which denomination of Judaism he followed: Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform. Lieberman replied, "I like to think of myself as an observant Jew, because it is broader and it's inclusive." This rather mild and good-natured remark sparked a torrent of criticism, providing fuel for those who felt Lieberman was selling out in his bid for the vice presidency. Binyamin Jolkovsky of The Jerusalem Post complained that Lieberman in this interview "changed his long-time self-description from 'Orthodox' to 'observant.'"

Jolkovsky's complaint ignored a couple of facts. Lieberman described himself as observant in his book In Praise of Public Life, released several months before the Larry King interview. What's more, in a separate interview just three days later, Lieberman began a sentence with the words "The fact that I'm Orthodox...." Nowhere did he change his self-description. He simply expressed a preference for one label over another.

Jolkovsky seemed to assume that adopting the term "observant" was tantamount to denying being Orthodox. I would expect non-Jews to be scratching their heads when listening to this squabble over terminology. Why would Orthodox Jews of all people be offended by the term "observant"? And why did Lieberman prefer the term?

Understanding what's going on here requires some historical background. The division of Judaism into its Orthodox and Reform branches occurred in the nineteenth century. As a new movement, Reform Judaism enacted changes to traditional Jewish practice. Jews who rejected the reforms and maintained the traditional ways came to be called Orthodox Jews.

In common parlance, Orthodox Judaism isn't really a single movement but rather an umbrella term for several Jewish groups that remained relatively traditional amidst the emergence of Reform Judaism. Sephardic Jews, who never even encountered the original Reform movement, are usually classed with the Orthodox today. But not everyone accepts this blanket use of the term Orthodox. There are those who restrict the term to the movement that arose as a direct reaction against Reform Judaism.

I tend to think of Orthodox Judaism as a retronym, or a new term for an old concept. Retronyms happen when a new version of something comes along, causing the old version to require a new name. For example, after microwave ovens were invented, older-style ovens came to be called "conventional ovens." (For those who think I'm implying that new is automatically better, I have two words: New Coke.)

In any case, it was Reform Jews who came up with the term Orthodox. Early Orthodox opponents of Reform, like Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, resisted the term. (The opposite is true of Christianity: The Eastern Orthodox Church gave itself the term orthodox, meaning "correct belief." But by the nineteenth century the word had acquired some negative connotations.)

Among Orthodox Jews themselves, the popular term is frum (pronounced with the vowel sound in wood). This Yiddish word literally means "pious," occasionally carrying negative overtones but most of the time used by Orthodox Jews as a respectful, informal alternative to "Orthodox."

The English word "observant" is not quite as popular. The problem is that many non-Orthodox Jews call themselves observant, and there's a perception that they use the word much more often than Orthodox Jews do. Because Orthodox Judaism tends to consider itself the only legitimate expression of Judaism, some people interpret a Jew's refusal to specify a denomination as contrary to the spirit of Orthodoxy.

As an Orthodox Jew myself, I have never accepted this reasoning. I like to do away with labels as much as I can. When I first set up an account with the dating site Frumster, I was required to describe what type of Orthodox Jew I was. I couldn't just say I was Orthodox; the site made me choose from the following subcategories: "Modern Orthodox liberal," "Modern Orthodox machmir," "Yeshivish Black Hat," "Hasidic," and "Carlebachian." I didn't feel comfortable with any of those, but I settled on "Modern Orthodox machmir," which seemed the least problematic to me.

Eventually, the site expanded its categories. Conservative and Reform Jews could now join the site, and everyone was given a wide range of choices for self-identification. I selected a new category called "Shomer Mitzvot," which literally means "watchful of the commandments"--in other words, observant. It was exactly the type of generic self-description I had been searching for all along.

A friend of mine recently told me that his daughter thinks one should never select that category. He did not remember why she felt this way, but I had little trouble guessing. She probably believes that someone who identifies as "Shomer Mitzvot" is in effect not calling himself Orthodox. Or, at least, she thinks that people might perceive it that way, and so it's best to avoid it if you want to increase your chances of finding a prospective match in the Orthodox community.

You know what? I don't care. I feel comfortable calling myself "Shomer Mitzvot," and that's all that matters. The last thing I'm going to do is bend to someone else's standards. I'm not that desperate. Besides, it all adds up in the end. If a woman assumes I'm not suited to her simply because I call myself "Shomer Mitzvot," then she's probably right.

Are video games a form of art?

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

Those words are from Roger Ebert in 2005, when he caused a firestorm with his assertion that video games are inherently not a form of art. Whether you agree with him or not, the ensuing debate was interesting. Unfortunately, Ebert's credibility was suspect, since by his own admission he lacked familiarity with modern video games. And his statement sounds just like the sort of narrow-minded declaration that's almost asking to be discredited. A couple of generations ago, most people would have scoffed at the idea that comic books are art; nowadays, that idea has gained increasingly wide acceptance (though the respected comic books carry a new name, graphic novels).

Still, I understand where Ebert is coming from. And I say this as someone who knows even less about modern video games than he does. I largely stopped playing them when I was a teenager. I felt that I wasn't getting out of them anywhere near as much as I was putting into them. They were an enjoyable diversion, but left me feeling drained when I spent too much time with them.

I'm aware that video games have increased in sophistication since the days of Nintendo, by huge orders of magnitude. And apparently some gamers think these are works of the human imagination that deserve comparison with great works of literature--or at least that they have that potential, even if the genre is in its infancy right now.

If you think that video games will never be Shakespeare, I should remind you that most people in Shakespeare's time would have laughed at the idea that his plays would be studied centuries later. Most of his plays weren't even published during his lifetime. And it took a long time before critics viewed them as serious works of literature, much less ranked him as the greatest writer in the English language.

Nowadays, people study the heavily footnoted texts of Shakespeare's plays in a manner that the Bard himself would never have envisioned. Is it possible that a similar process will happen with computer games? Will students of the future be studying games in the classroom, in a format that would perplex the original designers?

I debated these issues with someone on a message board a few years ago. He took the position that some video games have achieved an artistic level comparable to great literature and film; I was skeptical, even while admitting my ignorance. It was a nice debate, and I think we both ended up learning something. I learned from him that some modern video games--notably adventure games--have fairly complex narratives, with even the rudiments of character development. But I managed to persuade him that the very nature of video games cuts against the kind of complexity found in literature and film.

Traditionally, games have nothing to do with art. Chess may be a high intellectual activity, but it isn't really a form of art. What all art forms have in common, whether they be paintings, sculptures, poems, novels, plays, films, or comic books, is that the viewer contributes nothing to them beyond his own imagination. Interactive fiction (like the Choose Your Own Adventure series for kids) has always remained a minor phenomenon.

Computers have the potential to blur that line, however, creating games with a high degree of artistic content in terms of both graphics and narrative. But there is a limit. The only way they could achieve full artistic status is if they stopped being games.

I'll give an example from an old game I used to play, Infocom's text adventure The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, based on the Douglas Adams novel. The novel contains a scene where Arthur is at a party trying pick up a girl, when another guy comes along and catches her attention by saying he's from another planet. Your goal in the game, as a player, is to make sure the scene happens exactly as it did in the book. You can have no effect on Arthur's chances of getting the girl. Arthur is a loser. That's part of the script. Even if in real life you're God's gift to women, as computer game addicts are known to be, you're not going to change what Arthur's like. The game has a lot of puzzles that require brain power, but your personality doesn't affect the outcome.

Would it be possible to create a game where your personality does make a difference? I can imagine it now. It will be called SimFlirt. Your objective is to go to a party and pick up a girl. (Or, if you are a girl, then you pick up a guy. Or, if you're gay...never mind.) Whether you succeed depends on what you do or say.

Of course, such a game would never compare to a novel or a film. The range of possible outcomes would still be relatively limited. If a character in a computer game can have any level of depth, then it must be written into the game's narrative, without the player having much influence. The problem is that the player's very presence dilutes this process. Games simply are not a good medium for exploring the nuances of human behavior, at least not to the degree found in literature.

The point here is that games are different, not inferior. They serve a different purpose. I'm reminded of something Orson Scott Card said in his 1990 book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy: "In a fantasy, if magic has no limitations, the characters are omnipotent gods; anything can happen, and so there's no story. There have to be strict limits on magic. Dungeons and Dragons uses a seniority system that may work well for games, but for stories it is truly stupid: The longer you manage to stay alive, the more spells you know and the more power you have" (p. 31).

Note Card's implication that what works well in a game isn't believable in fiction. I would go further and suggest that what works in fiction isn't suited to a game. Even games with narratives, like D&D and computer adventure games, do not require the same suspension of disbelief as fiction does. That's because the narrative is only a means to an end, whereas in fiction the narrative is central. Perhaps the computer adventure games of today put a greater focus on narrative than ever before. But there comes a point when the integrity of the narrative must bow to the integrity of the game. Everything in a game falls back on the player's choices, and by giving the player choices, the narrative inevitably suffers.

If video games are blurring the distinction by taking on many artistic qualities, the question is how far they can go while still remaining games. And while there will always be people who devote their precious hours to these games, their impact may remain marginal simply because they forge that impossible middle ground between the artistic and the recreational.

The Jewish cab test

Shortly after Tiger Woods became the first black to win the Masters Tournament, he insisted that he was not black but "Cablinasian," a word he coined to describe the different groups in his ancestry: Caucasian, Black, Indian, and Asian. Sarcastic African-American columnist Gregory Kane retorted that Woods should be given "the cab test": "Stand him on a street corner in any large American city and have him hail a cab. If he gets one, he's Cablinasian. If he doesn't, he's definitely black" (The Baltimore Sun, Apr. 27, 1997, pg. 1B).

I wonder if a similar test could be applied to Jews. Arguably, the Holocaust was a grotesque version of this test, as Jews who abandoned their heritage and became atheists or Christians discovered that they were just as likely to be gassed as the bearded shtetl Jew. Hitler justified this innovation to classical anti-Semitism by arguing that Jews who assimilated took Jewish ideas with them. I can't say he was totally wrong.

These examples highlight one of the most basic questions about ethnic identity: is it defined by members of the group themselves, or by outsiders? For us Jews, this dilemma is even more perplexing, because we haven't even settled the "Who is a Jew?" question amongst ourselves. Why should we expect others to fare any better?

The traditional definition of a Jew is one whose mother is Jewish, or one who converts. (Computer scientists would call that a recursive definition.) But Orthodox Jews do not accept conversions done by Conservative or Reform rabbis, and Reform Judaism has expanded the definition to include those born to a Jewish father. Depending on one's perspective, individuals in many U.S. synagogues may not be Jewish.

No matter how strongly Orthodox Jews insist that their definition is the only legitimate one, non-Jews cannot be bothered to take sides on this in-the-family dispute. They have enough trouble dealing with a group that even by their standards defies all normal classifications. I have seen confused people on message boards write "Is Judaism a race or a religion?" as if it must be one or the other. In recent times, the trend has been to think of Jews as purely a religion and not to recognize their ethnic character. I increasingly see articles that describe celebrities as having been "born to Jewish parents." Some younger stars like Natalie Portman openly identify as Jewish, but there's a sense that it would be rude to describe someone as Jewish without their permission.

To people with this outlook, a phrase like "Jewish atheist" sounds as oxymoronic as "Catholic atheist," even though many older Jews identify as one. And what about that quaint phrase "the Jewish nation" which shows up in our prayerbooks? How can Jews be a nation? Doesn't that require a country? Of course, now Jews have a country, but those who never set foot there are still Jews.

Our unconventional classification arises from our long and complex history over 4,000 years. Few groups in the world have retained a sense of shared identity for that long, and so no matter how much we attempt to adapt to current norms, there lurks in our existence an element of the ancient that relatively modern categories like "race," "ethnic group," "religion," and "nation" can never quite capture.

The ancient Israelites could possibly be called a "tribe," though that term is rarely used, reserved instead for the twelve tribes within ancient Israel. Eventually, Israel did constitute a true nation. But after the Jews were exiled, they continued to think of themselves as Jews. In this respect, they were unusual. Most religions that spread outward from a single land retained religious but not national or ethnic identity. Partly this was because religions like Catholicism and Islam had a prosyletizing mission which Judaism lacked. Thus the people of Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran are Muslims but not Arabs. Because Jewish conversions never happened on a large scale (with possible exceptions like the Khazars), the converts became part of the Jewish people, losing their previous cultural identity. I have heard rabbis compare Jews to a family, where the converts are like adopted children. It's not a perfect analogy (since adopted children do not choose their parents), but it does give a sense of how Jews can think of themselves as having blood ties even while accepting converts.

The problem is that Gentiles would not be expected to pay any attention to how Jews defined themselves. What ultimately bound Jews together mirrored what bound blacks together: namely, persecution. It is worth asking whether there would be a concept such as "black" today if racism had never existed. It is similarly worth asking if Jews would have outlasted their ancient Middle-Eastern origins if anti-Semitism had never existed. Nowadays, many secular Jews admit that their Jewish identity is often driven by a desire to stick it to the anti-Semites. As Ilya Ehrenburg said, "so long as there is a single anti-Semite in the world, I shall declare with pride that I am a Jew" (qtd. in Alan Dershowitz's book Chutzpah, p. 14). Likewise, as anti-Semitism declines, or at least fades into the background, the concept of a secular Jew becomes harder to maintain.

Of course, if you define a Jew as anyone who may be a victim of anti-Semitism, then the definition becomes as arbitrary as bigotry is senseless. Plessy v. Ferguson sanctioned discrimination against a man who was black on the basis of one great-grandparent; many people with more African ancestry have passed for white. In a similar way, Barry Goldwater was subject to anti-Semitism even though he was a practicing Episcopalian with a Gentile mother; he probably would have been safe if his name had been Anderson. The cab test may be a sad reality for blacks, but for Jews it is something we must actively resist if we are to make sense of our lives.

Critics of homeschooling need to do their homework

Polls suggest that a slim majority of Americans oppose homeschooling, the method of choice for approximately two percent of the population. Ever since I took this educational route in high school, I have been stunned by the negative reactions it provokes. Though the opposition has declined significantly in the last decade, millions of Americans continue to find fault with this unusual mode of education, eager to offer their opinion on a subject they know nothing about.

It's no wonder that the arguments against homeschooling frequently contradict one another. Some critics allege that parents lack the qualifications to teach their children properly; others suggest that homeschooled children will be so hopelessly ahead they will be unable to relate to other kids their age. Some people imagine the prototypical homeschooled kid as shy and withdrawn; others imagine such a kid as loud and obnoxious. Whatever the argument, the critics base their views on very little if any personal knowledge of homeschooling. They haven't got a clue what homeschoolers actually do during the day, yet they seem to have endless confidence in their ability to guess.

One recent example of this attitude is a piece by blogger Russell Shaw for The Huffington Post. Shaw concedes that "home schooling works in some cases" (a mountain of research would suggest that this is an understatement), but he nonetheless thinks it should be restricted to those with an education degree, teaching children who are unable to attend school for physical reasons such as paralysis. Shaw, who assumes that homeschoolers learn through "rote recitation," worries that too many of the parents "want to keep their students at home in the service of simplicity and protectiveness," a situation that will make them ill-prepared for living in the real world.

Shaw's essay is very typical of anti-homeschooling pieces, not only lacking the slightest factual support for his positions but making provably false assertions of his own, such as the claim that homeschoolers consist primarily of fundamentalist Christians who reject evolution. (See here for the actual demographics.) Had Shaw bothered to look into the history of the movement he opposes, he would have learned that its godfather was a rather secular fellow named John Holt, who advocated homeschooling as an alternative to the "rote recitation" and lack of real-world preparation he observed as an instructor in traditional schools.

It's true that some homeschooling parents, like some private schools, teach creationism. Without explaining what he thinks should happen to private schools, Shaw denounces the situation: "as to the home schooler subjected to beliefs that run counter to scientific inquiry...I say send them to school and let the parents devote some of their off-hours to teaching what they feel their kids should know." Shaw implies here that it is the task of schools to expose kids to what is true, against those parents who will teach them what is false. But who decides what is true and what is false? The government? Shaw's point may resonate with those who envision homeschooling parents as extremists, but his larger implication is, frankly, scary.

If Shaw truly values scientific inquiry, then he should base his conclusions on facts, not hunches. Stephen Colbert coined the word truthiness to describe conservatives who rely on gut feelings as a substitute for evidence. If there is any issue on which some liberals exhibit this quality in abundance, it is this one.

The democracy of encyclopedias

One time when I worked as a college tutor, a student referenced Wikipedia in his paper on plants. I asked him if he knew what Wikipedia was. He said no. I explained that it was a user-created encyclopedia, that anyone can alter the contents at any time, and that I could take my laptop right there and change the article to say, "Plants are little green men secretly plotting to take over Earth." The student looked at me in surprise, but I assured him I was dead serious.

At this point you might be expecting me to launch into an anti-Wikipedia rant. I refuse to jump on that bandwagon, however. Wikipedia is the perfect example of a new development that traditional people just don't "get." Not that these critics are wrong exactly. Wikipedia does often provide inaccurate information and should not be cited in an academic paper. But the critics assume that once they make this observation, the issue is closed: Wikipedia is virtually worthless as a resource. I have had a very hard time talking to people who take this attitude. When I try to defend Wikipedia, I am frequently greeted by a dismissive snort, as if to imply that giving Wikipedia any credit would be to demonstrate massive gullibility. ("What, you actually trust Wikipedia?") This reaction, in my view, reveals a somewhat one-dimensional perspective on what makes something a valuable research tool.

What is Wikipedia? It's an online encyclopedia in which anyone with Internet access may write an article or modify existing ones. You can make grammatical corrections, contribute a sentence, provide a citation, or add a new section. Of course, you can also put in something ridiculous or offensive. Many users do just that, but the site keeps a back log of all previous versions of every article, and so as soon as anyone changes anything, people check. Outlandish changes usually get quickly reverted--but they still occur quite often. I once visited an article on John Ritter only to be informed that the late actor had risen from the grave. Editors may temporarily close off articles that get swamped by "vandals."

Wikipedia has many standards that users are expected to uphold. Articles must have citations, "no original research," and a "neutral point of view." Every article has a discussion page in which users can work out conflicts or disagreements. Articles that fail to meet these standards will receive a tag pointing out this fact.

Forget about the accuracy question for a moment. I want to make a point that often gets overlooked in these discussions: Wikipedia is quite possibly the most extensive enyclopedia ever compiled. It is for sure one of the largest. (See here for comparisons.) I'm not sure the term "encyclopedia" does the site justice. The sheer amount of topics covered is mind-boggling. To wit, you will find lengthy articles on all of the following:

1. Books, movies, TV shows (even individual episodes!), and music groups (even individual songs!). This includes not just classics, but also numerous obscure modern works. The selection is constantly expanding; I contributed the article on the novel Somewhere in Time just a couple of weeks ago.

2. In-depth information about small, specialized subjects that get only the most cursory treatment in standard encyclopedias. What are your hobbies? One of mine is juggling. On Wikipedia, not only are there articles on Enrico Rastelli, Francis Brunn, and other names not well-known outside the juggling community, there is also an extensive history of juggling, a thorough examination of each piece of equipment, and a detailed look at a wide range of techniques and tricks.

3. Obscure concepts from technical fields, like evolutionary biology's "population bottleneck" or computer science's "self-balancing binary search tree."

4. Almanac-like lists of the major events in any particular year.

5. Huge information about cities. Not only is there a lengthy article about Baltimore, there are individual articles devoted to all the local universities, libraries, cemeteries, and even major streets! (My brother contributed an article about the local bus routes, which some editors considered deleting for being "unencyclopedic.")

At this point, you might be asking, "What's the point of all this information if it isn't reliable?" Now hold on just one second. Is Wikipedia unreliable? A controversial and hotly contested 2005 study in the journal Nature compared Wikipedia's scientific articles with those in Encyclopedia Britannica and found that Wikipedia on average has four errors per article, whereas Britannica has on average three. This fact becomes especially astonishing when you consider that Wikipedia's articles are typically much longer than Britannica's.

How can that be? How can an encyclopedia in which any twelve-year-old may contribute even begin to approach the accuracy of one compiled by a panel of experts? There lies the paradox of Wikipedia: even though it has an endless capacity for error, it doesn't necessarily have a much greater tendency toward error than traditional encyclopedias. It's true that any idiot can write an article, but it will then be subject to what amounts to a gigantic peer-review process.

There are some advantages to this format. The information tends to stay very up to date. (I have found their pages on celebrities updated within hours of a celebrity's death.) And they seem to be very good at staying on top of urban legends. My 1993 edition of Compton's, in contrast, under the topic of "Language" repeats the old urban legend that Eskimos have many words for snow. That kind of nonsense would never last long in Wikipedia, where there may be a lot more ignoramuses, but there are also a lot more fact-checkers.

Still, the errors are there. They might be even worse in the foreign-language editions, which I've noticed are often simply amateur translations of the English edition. I corrected an Israeli-edition article that identified Connecticut as a city in Maryland. (I later figured out the cause of the error: the translator misunderstood a sentence in which the two states were listed one after the other, separated by a comma.)

Thus, Wikipedia should not be viewed as authoritative. Any information you get from it needs to be corroborated. That, however, is very different from saying Wikipedia lacks value as a resource. I will mention one example from my experience to illustrate my point.

When I was doing a school paper on Silence of the Lambs (the basis for this post), I looked up the term "psychopath" on Wikipedia, because a character in the film had applied the term to Hannibal Lecter. Wikipedia brought me to the page on "anti-social personality disorder," the clinical term, and listed the seven symptoms associated with the disorder, which I subsequently mentioned in my paper.

There was no problem of verification here: the article had a direct link to DSM-IV-TR, the diagnostic manual from which this information came. You might now ask why I needed Wikipedia--why didn't I just go directly to the manual? But how would I, a layperson who hasn't studied psychiatry, know in advance to go there? That's the beauty of Wikipedia. It gathers together an enormous amount of resources that might otherwise be hard to locate.

As it stands, corroborating Wikipedia's information is not difficult, because the good articles provide links and citations. Some of the less developed articles do not, but so what? You are free to dismiss any unverified information you find. It's true that some folks, like the student I tutored, may fall prey to the misinformation. But that's their problem. If not for Wikipedia, these same people would be getting their information from "Bob's Webpage." Wikipedia is very open about its process and should not be blamed if some people misuse the site.

Not only can misinformation be found in respected encylopedias like Britannica, it can be found even in very scholarly texts. In other words, no resource should be viewed as 100% reliable. Corroboration is a standard procedure of research, and the proper use of Wikipedia is really no different than the way we approach any other source.

Certainly, Wikipedia is both imperfect and incomplete. That's a given that not even Wikipedia's staunchest defenders will deny. The site is a massive organic entity, constantly being tinkered, constantly being updated, and much work remains to be done. In a way, I feel bad for the critics. They're in a Catch-22 situation, since the more they complain about Wikipedia's faults, the better Wikipedia becomes.

Curses

Even though profanity is commonplace in the movies, I've never quite gotten the hang of hearing it in music. Though I rarely swear myself, I'm not intrinsically opposed to hearing others do it. After all, one of my favorite movies is Pulp Fiction, and one of my favorite comedians is Chris Rock. But whenever I hear it in songs, it almost invariably seems coarse to me. Why the double standard?

It may have something to do with my age and generation. Much of the music I heard growing up came through the radio and MTV, both of which censor offensive language. Movies, on the other hand, I was most likely to see through theaters, video, and premium cable stations, none of which are known to edit for content. In any case, before the 1990s swearing was not remotely as commonplace in popular music as it was in movies. When Ozzy Osbourne reinvented himself as a reality TV star in 2002, he quickly gained a reputation as a foul mouth. Yet I cannot recall ever hearing profanity in any of his songs, from Black Sabbath to his present solo records. He came from a generation of musicians where swearing was rare in any music that got wide radio play. That tendency continued well into the '80s, despite the prevalence of strong language even in family movies like Back to the Future.

Having never followed hip hop, I first noticed the change during the alternative rock boom of the early '90s. Pearl Jam used the f-word in two early hits, "Even Flow" and "Jeremy," though it was so mumbled it often got past the censors. In the mid-'90s, Alanis Morissette brought profanity into the mainstream with songs like "You Oughta Know" and "Hand in My Pocket." Bleeped out words became increasingly common on adult contemporary stations.

Although I am a fan of certain artists who use profanity in their music, I have rarely found that the practice adds anything of value to a song. In Johnny Cash's wonderful cover of Nine Inch Nail's "Hurt," for example, the line "I wear this crown of shit" is changed to "I wear this crown of thorns." Now doesn't the altered version sound so much nicer? Hey, I know it's a dark song, but that doesn't mean I want to be reminded of poop.

I realize that what I'm saying might just be a cultural prejudice. Swearing itself is a curious phenomenon, if you stop to think about it. There's nothing intrinsic to the meaning of swear words that makes people take offense at them. The way we designate them as out-of-bounds, while tolerating other words with the same meanings, is almost superstitious. Sociolinguists, in fact, liken both profanity and racial epithets to the magical words deemed unutterable in certain tribal societies.

There are times when it would almost be perverse not to swear. Even the normally wholesome Bill Cosby couldn't help indulging himself one time during his classic performance Bill Cosby Himself:

I said to a guy, "Tell me, what is it about cocaine that makes it so wonderful?" and he said, "Because it intensifies your personality." I said, "Yes, but what if you're an asshole?"

If you replaced the word "asshole" with a more polite alternative, the joke would simply not work. This suggests that swear words occasionally convey nuances that milder language cannot achieve. Most of the time, however, people resort to swearing as a way of avoiding more descriptive language. In that sense, the real problem with swear words is not so much that they're crude as that they're clichéd. When overused, they begin to take on the quality of the word "smurf" in those old Smurf cartoons, just all-purpose expressions that make the language less varied.

Since movies aim to capture the dialogue of real people, swearing has a well-established place in the movies, even though it can be overdone--and often is. I have more trouble justifying the practice in music, because song lyrics, much more than dialogue, thrive on indirectness. That's one of the reasons that "Blowin' in the Wind" is such a better antiwar song than, say, "Eve of Destruction." In music, it seems, the last thing you want to do is get to the point. Or it could be that I'm just getting old.

A paranormal romance

I recently discussed my love of the Richard Matheson novel What Dreams May Come. Now I'm going to talk about another Matheson novel, Somewhere in Time (originally titled Bid Time Return but later changed to fit the movie). I cannot exactly recommend this novel. In fact, I thought the 1980 film version improved on it considerably. Matheson, however, considers this book and What Dreams May Come to be his two greatest novels. He may even have conceived them as one book. The similarities between the two are striking. The protagonists in both books are blond 6'2" screenwriters who live in Hidden Hills, California and love classical music. They each have a brother named Robert who acquires the protagonist's memoirs but cannot bring himself to accept the otherworldly events described in them. Both books are paranormal love stories, but they emphasize different phenomena.

In Somewhere in Time, a 30-something man named Richard Collier has been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and has decided, upon a coin flip, to spend his last days hanging around the Hotel del Coronado, a famous California hotel. There he grows obsessed with the photograph of a nineteenth-century stage actress, Elise McKenna, who once performed there. Through research, he learns that she never married, that she had an overprotective manager, and that she may have had a brief affair with a mysterious man while staying at the hotel. The more Richard learns, the more convinced he becomes that it is his destiny to travel back in time and become that mysterious man.

This is an interesting setup. But the execution is shaky. I barely could get through the first fifty pages, which consist of Richard's rambling journal entries as nothing happens. I realize that Matheson was attempting realism, but I don't consider that a good excuse. A novel must involve the reader or it isn't worth our time. The book's deepest flaw, however, is the love story itself. I simply did not like the character of Elise. The development of her relationship with Richard feels artificial and forced. It's definitely a case of the journey being more interesting than the destination.

The novel's most striking feature is its depiction of time travel. It's probably the only novel I've ever encountered that proposes a step-by-step method that does not require any futuristic accessories or special abilities. The method is presented in such detail that it almost tempts readers to try it themselves. I bet that some have, though I have my doubts that any have succeeded.

Richard bases his method on the theories of a real book, J.B. Priestley's Man and Time. The basic idea is that he uses self-hypnosis to convince his mind that he's in the past. He listens over and over to a tape recording of his own voice declaring that the year is 1896 and listing many details of how his surroundings would look in that year. After discovering that his voice is distracting him, he writes the hypnotic suggestions out on paper, over and over and over. The historical roots of the hotel help reinforce his purpose, as does an 1890s suit he buys for himself.

Of course, skeptical readers may suspect that the time-traveling experience occurs only in Richard's mind. Matheson leaves open that possibility. So if you think the love story is unconvincing and seems more like a lonely man's pathetic fantasy, that may be just what Matheson intended.

The movie does a better job of handling these themes. The plot is clearer and more focused. There's no mention of Richard having a brain tumor, and there seems to be external evidence that his journey really took place, such as in an early scene where an old woman goes up to him in a crowd and hands him a pocket watch and says, "Come back to me." He later takes the watch with him into the past, where he gives it to the woman when she's young. This generates one of the most famous time-travel paradoxes in the movies, the watch that seems to have no point of origin, just eternally existing in an endless loop. The book contains other paradoxes of this kind, but more subtly.

While the movie did poorly in theaters and receieved mostly negative reviews, it went on to become a cult classic, with an actual fan club. Being less than enamored by the love story, I was only able to admire the film's craft. It felt to me like an episode of The Twilight Zone, a show to which Matheson contributed heavily. But neither the book nor the film enthralled me the way the novel What Dreams May Come did, perhaps because this time I wasn't truly permitted entry into a new world.

The science of fruits, nuts, and flakes

Some years ago, not long after reading parts of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, a book about the remarkable persistence of superstitions among educated people, I discovered that a highly intelligent woman I know, who has a science degree and has always seemed rationalist in her outlook, believes in astrology. She described the traits of my sign, Aquarius, and they did seem to fit me fairly well. I don't remember her description now, so instead I'll post what Wikipedia says about the sign:

Individuals born under this sign are thought to have a modest, creative, challenging, inquisitive, entertaining, progressive, stimulating, nocturnal, and independent character, but one which is also prone to rebelliousness, coldness, erraticism, indecisiveness, and impracticality.

I have to admit that that does kind of sound like me. I like to think of myself as creative, challenging, and independent. I know I am impractical and indecisive, and unquestionably I am nocturnal. On the other hand, the article also claims that male Aquarians "are often said to tend to be effeminate in appearance." Hey, I may not be the most macho of sorts, but I sure as hell ain't effeminate looking.

But there lies the problem. One of the most obvious features of pseudoscience is allowing subjectivity to influence the testing of predictions. Having people examine their own personalities is notoriously unreliable, since people tend not to have accurate perceptions of themselves. What exactly would constitute a "bad" astrological reading? If you didn't feel the description sounded like you? If your friends didn't think so? And how close does the description have to match your personality in order to prove that its alleged accuracy isn't merely coincidental? (For example, I suspect that there are many creative and independent types not born under Aquarius.) Astrologers never set up any quantifiable boundaries by which their "predictions" can succeed or fail. It's all left up to the whim of the person reading the horoscope.

Still, I can imagine ways in which the claims of astrologers might be tested. Gather a group of people together, and give only some of them their true astrological readings. Give the others a deliberately false reading. For example, the Gemini gets the Scorpio's reading. None of the people know whether they are receiving a correct reading or not. Perhaps none of them know there even are any incorrect readings. Even the person doing the testing doesn't know which ones are correct and which ones aren't. The subjects are then asked to rate their readings, on a scale of one to ten, by how closely they feel it describes them.

Now comes the fun part: compare the reactions of the people who got false readings and the people who got true readings. If the claims of astrology are valid, then the people who got true readings should be substantially more likely to think the readings accurately describe them. If, on the other hand, there isn't much difference between the reactions of the two groups, then the claims of astrology would seem to be bogus.

Has anyone ever tried such an experiment? Do believers in astrology even care? Hey, I know that even this test probably wouldn't pass muster with the scientific community. It still has the problem that people are examining their own personalities, rather than being objectively evaluated by a disinterested outsider.

Of course, many scientists will dismiss astrology out of hand simply because of its premise that celestial bodies many light years away can have a perceptible effect on human behavior. But I'm willing to entertain this premise for the sake of argument, because astrology in principle does make real predictions about observable facts. If those predictions were scientifically confirmed, we'd have to concede that there's something to the system, no matter how absurd its philosophical underpinnings may sound. Skeptics can take comfort from the fact that we're a long way from ever having to confront that possibility.

Those other Jews

I will now quote an anecdote from Alan Dershowitz's wonderful book Chutzpah, because I think it provides considerable insight into the way a bigot's mind works:

"I related the story of a slightly eccentric Brahmin woman from Boston who came to see me about a legal problem. I concluded that her problem was not within the area of my expertise, so I recommended another lawyer. She asked whether he was Jewish, and I responded, 'What difference does that make?' She said that she didn't 'get along very well with Jews' and didn't know whether she could 'trust them.' I asked her why she had come to me, since I was obviously Jewish. I'll never forget her answer: 'The Jews I know are all fine. I have a Jewish doctor and a Jewish pharmacist whom I trust with my life. It's those other Jews--the money-grubbing ones, the dishonest ones--that I'm not comfortable with.'

"I pressed the Brahmin woman about whether she had actually ever encountered one of 'those' Jews, and she responded, 'Heavens, no. I would never allow myself to have any contact with such a person.' The lawyer I recommended happened to be Jewish, and the two of them got along famously." (p. 99)

The most overlooked novel

We generally expect books to be better than their film adaptations. The most extreme example from my experience may be What Dreams May Come. I strongly disliked the 1998 film, and I probably would have quickly forgotten about it, except that I noticed it was based on a 1978 novel by Richard Matheson, whose fiction I had enjoyed previously. So I picked up a copy from the library. It has since become one of my favorite books.

I am not alone in this reaction, but I am in a minority. Most people haven't read the book, and most people won't even try. There are just too many preconceptions standing in their way. And, unfortunately, the movie has helped further those preconceptions. People assume it isn't the type of book they'd like to read. They think it is too "New Agey" for their tastes, or too sentimental. On the first point, they are probably correct; on the second, they couldn't be more wrong.

Why do I like the book so much? Put simply, it is the most vivid, complex, and surprisingly convincing depiction of afterlife I have ever encountered in a work of fiction. Nothing else I have seen on the subject, in literature or in film, comes close--certainly not the movie version of the book. Before I read the novel, I had no idea that a story about Heaven and Hell could have such a profound effect on me. I have always believed in afterlife as a matter of faith, but I would never before have thought it could be convincingly described in human terms.

The story involves a middle-aged man named Chris who dies and goes to Heaven, and who ultimately descends into Hell to rescue his wife. It's basically a modern-day variation on The Divine Comedy, as a man gets a tour of the afterlife. In the metaphysics of the film and the book, dying involves shedding your physical body and entering a mental environment shaped by thoughts. Your fate in such an environment is largely self-imposed. If you're a decent, pleasant person, your afterlife experience will be pleasant; if you're someone with moral problems, you'll naturally have a more difficult experience. As the novel puts it, "People are not punished for their deeds but by them" (p. 265).

That much of the movie intrigued me, the first time I saw it. The problem was the schmaltz. I mean real schmaltz, piled on in large mounds, in place of strong narrative. The beginning gives us scene after scene of two lovers (Robin Williams and Anabella Sciorra) doing little more than stare at each other and giggle, with solemn music in the background. The film is so inept at fleshing out their lives that it shows their wedding, the tragic death of their children, and fifteen years passing before it reveals out of the blue that Chris is a doctor! The performances by Williams and Cuba Gooding, Jr. are surprisingly atrocious, maybe because they could scarcely believe their own lines.

For those who have only seen the movie, it's hard for me to convey just how very different the novel is. Of course there are major differences in the plot. One such difference is the ending. (Even Roger Ebert, who heaped high praise on the film, was disappointed by the ending.) Another is the beginning, where the film has Chris's children also die and go to Heaven. In doing this, the movie (1) makes the early scenes so depressing they become surreal (2) needlessly clutters the story with extra characters (3) introduces a silly and confusing subplot about Chris's attempts to find his children, who are in disguise.

In the book, Chris's children are adults, not youngsters, and they're minor characters. The details of Chris's life on Earth differ so greatly between the book and the film that it's like reading about a completely different person. Even though I saw the movie first, the image of Robin Williams completely vanished from my mind as I read, because he was so unlike the character described in the book.

The entire feel of the book is different, telling a touching love story that uses real characterization, not cheap manipulation, to move the audience. And Matheson's vision of the afterlife truly comes alive on the page. The Hell scenes are actually terrifying, reminding us, as the movie does not, why Matheson is primarily famous as a horror writer.

I won't overlook the movie's gorgeous visual effects, which earned the film a well-deserved Academy Award. They just aren't put to good purpose. The movie's vision of the afterlife as like being inside giant paintings fails to evoke a sense of reality. The book, in contrast, bases its afterlife imagery (vividly brought to life by Matheson's skillful prose) much more on Earth-like scenery. This approach ironically leads to far more exotic ideas, such as architects who build things using their minds, and a library containing history books more objective than those on Earth. Matheson puts the reader right inside this setting, as the following passage illustrates:

I noticed, then, there were no shadows on the ground. I sat beneath a tree yet not in shade. I didn't understand that, and looked for the sun.

There wasn't any.... There was light without a sun. I looked around in confusion. As my eyes grew more accustomed to the light, I saw further into the countryside. I had never seen such scenery: a stunning vista of green-clad meadows, flowers, and trees. Ann would love this, I thought.

I remembered then. Ann was still alive. And I? I stood and pressed both palms against the solid tree trunk. Stamped on solid ground with my shoe. I was dead; there could be no question about it any longer. Yet here I was, possessed of a body that felt the same and looked the same, was even dressed the same. Standing on this very real ground in this most tangible of landscapes....

I turned my hands over and noticed that their skin and nails were pink. There was blood inside me. I had to shake myself to make certain I wasn't dreaming. I held my right hand over my nose and mouth and felt breath pulsing warmly from my lungs.... (p. 55-6)

And here is a passage from one of the book's Hell scenes: "Now I saw that, interspersed throughout the area we crossed, were pools of dark and filthy-looking liquid; I hesitate to call it water. A loathsome stench beyond that which I had ever been exposed to rose from these pools. And I was horrified to see movement in them as though unfortunates had slipped beneath the surface and were unable to rise" (p. 183).

Matheson, as I mentioned, is a famous horror writer. One of his unique qualities is his almost scientific approach to the supernatural. As Roger Ebert explains in his review of the Matheson-penned Legend of Hell House:

Matheson labored for years in the elusive territory between straight science fiction and the supernatural horror genre, developing a kind of novel in which vampires, ghouls, and the occult are treated as if they came under ordinary scientific classifications.

There was, for example, the Matheson classic I Am Legend.... In that one, a single normal man held hundreds of vampires...at bay by figuring out the scientific reasons for old medieval antivampire measures like mirrors, crucifixes, and garlic. The Matheson novels of the 1950s and early 1960s anticipated pseudorealistic fantasy novels like Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist.

In What Dreams May Come, Matheson makes Heaven and Hell seem like a scientific, natural process, and one of the joys of the book is discerning all the intricate "rules" of how everything works. (That's another area where the movie falls short.) What needs to be kept in mind, however, is that Matheson doesn't do this just for entertainment purposes. In the novel's introduction, he tells his readers that the characters are the only fictional component of the novel, and that almost everything else is based on research. The book even includes a lengthy bibliography. Thus, the afterlife that Matheson describes isn't some fantasy world he concocted from his own head, but something he believes to be an accurate description of reality.

Some people may wonder, at this point, about Matheson's religious background. He was raised a Christian Scientist, but gradually developed what he calls his own religion, taking elements from many sources. One of the book's main influences, I believe, is eighteenth-century Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.

The book avoids seeming "religious" in any way other than its setting. There are no deities, no mention of Christ or anything specific to the theology of a particular religion. The characters occasionally talk about God, but it is left up to the reader to decide whether the Creator in charge of this system is at all like the Judeo-Christian God or like something more pantheistic. The book even implies that no single religion has the whole truth:

"For instance, you'll find, in the hereafter, the particular heaven of each theology."

"Which is right then?" I asked, completely baffled now.

"All of them," he said, "and none. Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem, Christian, Jew--each has an after-life experience which reflects his own beliefs. The Viking had his Valhalla, the American Indian his Happy Hunting Ground, the zealot his City of Gold. All are real. Each is a portion of the overall reality.

"You'll even find, here, those who claim that survival is nonsense," he said. "They bang their nonmaterial tables with their nonmaterial fists and sneer at any suggestion of a life beyond matter. It's the ultimate irony of delusion." (pp. 90-1)

From what I've seen, people react negatively to this book based on how far it departs from their personal beliefs. Christians complain about the absence of Jesus, while those who don't believe in any afterlife consider the story too nonsensical to accept. Most readers, it seems, are put off by the New Age terminology and concepts scattered throughout the book.

These reactions are puzzling, if you stop to think about it. Books about elves, fairies, dragons, and wizards remain popular even though nobody believes in any of those things. Why should people be bothered by a fiction book portraying a Heaven and Hell that conflicts with what they believe? The book is perfectly enjoyable whether or not you accept Matheson's metaphysics.

Of course, I personally do think Matheson provides insight into the subject--though I admit I'm a little wary of his acceptance of paranormal phenomena. But it amazes me how so many people refuse to even touch the book, thinking that any story with such a plot must automatically be hokey. In most cases, they'd be right. What Dreams May Come is a big exception. It suggests the endless possibilities in a subject that normally is dead weight for fiction. And it really makes you think.

Ultra-Beautiful

When I was a child, I knew of only two divisions in Judaism: frum and not frum. From a Yiddish word meaning "pious," this is the Orthodox Jewish way of designating observant Jews. The word "Orthodox" itself seemed fairly alien to me, used mostly as a formality. Later, I became aware of a distinct sub-group called "Modern Orthodox," which I first conceptualized as frum Jews who ignore strictures against mixed dancing. Later still, I began hearing the term "ultra-Orthodox," which my friends and family perceived as a vague slur applied by ignorant outsiders to any Orthodox Jews they considered too extreme. We were irritated, and a bit perplexed, by the media's increasing use of the term as though it were an objective, neutral description of a distinct group.

By now, the term "ultra-Orthodox" has become so standard in the media that people use it without blinking an eye. I'm torn on the subject, wondering if I should still fight the trend, or just give in. There are two primary issues here. The first is whether the term is inherently pejorative. The second is whether such a group as "ultra-Orthodox" really exists.

To answer the first question, we need only look at the history of the prefix ultra. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the term originally meant "beyond" (as in ultraviolet) but came to mean "extremist" when applied to political movements.¹ The connotation is that such movements are "beyond the pale," which is obviously a value judgment applied by outsiders, not a term people would normally apply to themselves. Occasionally you will find people today who proudly identify as ultraconservative or ultraliberal, but there's no question that those terms were originally intended as insults. It's like when some blacks call themselves by the N-word.

One blogger told me that he doesn't mind being called ultra-Orthodox, just as he wouldn't mind being called ultra-beautiful or ultra-smart. That's an interesting argument, but I think it proves my very point: people rarely use phrases like "ultra-beautiful," because the prefix ultra is generally reserved for insults, which is almost certainly what was originally intended by the term "ultra-Orthodox."

As an experiment, I googled the phrase "ultra-Orthodox." Of the first ten hits, two are Wikipedia articles, two are allegedly neutral news articles, one site complains about the term, and the remaining five are sites bashing ultra-Orthodox Jews. You may consider this result too small a sample to draw a conclusion, but I invite anyone to try the experiment on a larger scale. You will likely find what many of us have sensed all along, which is that "ultra-Orthodox" is widely used as an insulting term, and almost never used in a complimentary sense.

Of course, it is possible to take a pejorative expression and wear it defiantly, as a badge of pride. But so-called ultra-Orthodox Jews have made no collective attempts to do so. Those rare few who self-identify by the term are, I suspect, surrendering themselves to a trend they feel powerless against, rather than eagerly embracing the term.

Because the secular press regularly treats the term as a neutral expression, and because the term simultaneously exists as an insult, the people who use the term insultingly have gained a significant rhetorical advantage. It has become one of those words like fundamentalist where you can pretend to be neutral when you're actually invoking a stereotype. I'm reminded of an article by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in which he describes religious fundamentalism as immoral and destructive.² He never bothers to provide a precise definition of "fundamentalism," and he seems unaware that the standard definition would apply to his own religious practice. He unblinkingly defines the term according to popular negative stereotypes associated with the term. Once you start incorporating stereotypes about a group into the very definition of that group, you've won the argument before you've even started. The term "ultra-Orthodox" has that same two-faced quality.

That brings me to the second question. Does "ultra-Orthodox," insulting or not, refer to an actual group? It is supposedly the English equivalent of Haredi. There are certainly many Jews who self-identify as Haredi. Though there are also people who bash Haredim, nobody considers the term in itself to be insulting. It is fairly neutral, neither positive nor negative. (Repeating the Google experiment with "Haredi," I found three web definitions, one actual Haredi site, one site bashing the non-mainstream Neturei Karta sect rather than Haredim in general, and five neutral articles. The articles, I should mention, are on the whole more respectful than the ones I found in the "ultra-Orthodox" search.) There probably ought to be a campaign to have the secular press adopt the term, but for now it is rather obscure, known only to Orthodox Jews and occasional outsiders.

The problem, which few people acknowledge, is that Haredi is vague and imprecise. It presupposes that Orthodoxy can be neatly divided into two groups, those who reject the outside world and those who embrace it. The former are Haredi or "ultra-Orthodox," the latter are Modern Orthodox. This classification has been widely reported in the media, but it would raise the eyebrows of most Jews in my native Baltimore. Baltimore's Orthodox community is very largely "yeshivish" or "black hat," two insider terms referring to non-Hasidic Jews who are stricter in their observance than Modern Orthodoxy. By the two-pole classification, that would constitute Haredi. But most Baltimore frummies do not fit the standard definition of Haredim. Most people here have a strong work ethic, for example, and there has been no community ban on using the Internet in one's home. Anti-secular attitudes exist here but do not generally prevail.

Modern Orthodox, for that matter, covers a wide range of attitudes and practices. Some people have attempted to recognize a third group, "centrist," represented most prominently by the Orthodox Union and Yeshiva University. This would cover Jews who are strict in their observance but who embrace the outside world. In fact, it is pretty common to hear Orthodox Jews using phrases like "left-of-center," "right-of-center," "far left," etc., as though Orthodoxy resembled the left-right political spectrum in the secular world. While still a simplification, this outlook is a vast improvement over those who conceptualize Orthodoxy as two distinct "camps."

Thus, it's important to understand that when Orthodox Jews use a term like "Haredi," they usually recognize how blurry the dividing line is. But what about people outside the Orthodox community, especially those with little knowledge of Orthodoxy? Those people are likely to be considerably less understanding--and they're also more likely to use a term like "ultra-Orthodox" instead of "Haredi." It's no wonder, therefore, that most people who use the term "ultra-Orthodox" use it thoughtlessly, without a clear picture of what they're referring to. For many people, it's just a code word for "Jewish religious nut." Hence, it's not uncommon to see the term applied ignorantly to Religious Zionists, even though that group is usually distinct from the Haredim, at least in Israel.

If we were to run a successful campaign and the media were to stop saying "ultra-Orthodox" and to start saying "Haredi" instead, it wouldn't solve everything. Outsiders would continue to oversimplify the dynamics of the Orthodox community. But it would be a start. A few people might think twice before applying such an exotic term with such a broad brush to people they don't know.

Works Cited
¹ The Online Etymology Dictionary. "ultra-" http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ultra-"
² Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. "How Religion Leads to Fundamentalism." http://www.shmuley.com/articles.php?id=183