Book Review

Hasidism: A New History

by David Biale et al

     If you’ve ever been to New York, be it upstate, downstate, or in the city itself, you have no doubt encountered Hasidic Jews at some time. Due to their distinctive clothing they are hard not to notice. Sooner or later, curiosity gets the better of us and we start to wonder who these people are and what they are all about. Answers are not always easy to come by. There are not many books written about the Hasidim and your average person isn’t well informed. Therefore, the acclaimed Jewish historian David Biale and a team of seven other scholars put together this 800 page cement block of a tome called Hasidism: A New History. Despite its size, it is an accessible book that should answer a lot of questions that any curious person might have about this enigmatic community.

As it should, this historical account begins with the founding of the movement. In the 1700s, there was a Jewish scholar named Israel Ba’al Shem Tov who lived in the Polish-Lithuanian Federation encompassing what is now Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Israel Ba’al Shem Tov was a scholar of the kabbalah and a tsaddik which is something like a Jewish shaman. His practice emphasized trances, ecstatic prayer, singing, dancing, and the experience of devekut, a mystical union with God. He actually had no intention of starting a religious movement. He was simple a scholar who, at various times in his life, attracted other like-minded scholars of The Torah and other Jewish texts. Many of these scholars returned to their communities and shared their newfound knowledge with others and groups, known as Hasidim, began to form into courts around each tsaddik. The tsaddiks were elevated to the status of rebbes, which, if I understand correctly, are strong authority figures who guide their court’s beliefs, practices, and lifestyles. Membership in these Hasidic communities was initially limited to men only. Each Hasidic court operated independently of the others and they all varied from one another on matters of doctrine and ritual. Sometimes this led to conflict between competing Hasidic courts.

Another source of conflict came from other members of the Eastern European Jewish communities who came to be known as the Mitnaggdim. Since most of the Hasidim were illiterate, they never wrote down their own history so what we know about them came from the Mitnaggdim who wrote books and pamphlets in opposition to the new movement. Therefore it is up to the scholar to sort out what is fact and what is derogatory propaganda. When the Mitnaggdim characterized the Hasidim as a bunch of drunken, Dionysian revelers, we can’t dismiss the allegation entirely. Since the Hasidim practiced devekut through singing, dancing, and ecstatic ritual prayer, you can say that Hasidim valued experience over intellectualism. The Hasidim were not necessarily anti-intellectual; it is just that they valued communal ritual practice over scholarship and attention to Jewish law which is what differentiates them from other strains of Orthodox Judaism to this day.

As time went on, the tsaddiks got older and passed their leadership roles down to their sons so that dynasties were formed. These dynasties were named after their places of origin so when we hear names like Chabad-Lubavitch, Chernobyl, Ger, Belz, and others we can trace back the lineage to the location and rebbe of its first court.

The authors characterize the nineteenth century as the Golden Age of Hasidism. That was the time when the movement spread outside of Poland-Lithuania into Russia and the Austro-Hungarian territories. As they gathered momentum, they picked up new members along the way. The Hasidim were primarily rural people who survived by farming. With the invention of the railroad, pilgrimages to visit Hasidic courts became more frequent and these annual journeys became the high points of many adherents’ lives. All the while, the borders of the Hasidic community were porous so that some Jews attended the courts without being full-fledged members. Some Hasidim moved from court to court, sometimes belonging to two or more at the same time. Gentiles sometimes found themselves attracted to the courts as well and were known for seeking out medical aid, the blessing of talismans, or simple spiritual advice from nearby tsaddiks.

Of course, this burst of energy led to an eventual decline as Modernism set in. Impoverished Jews were forced to move to cities to live where they encountered more cosmopolitan ideas including socialism, anarchism, Zionism, and reformed Judaism. The Hasdic courts were decimated, but what remained became a bulwark of anti-modernity and a haven for traditional, and some would say reactionary and backwards, forms of Judaism.

Then came the two World Wars and the Holocaust. The authors don’t dwell too long on the Holocaust and for good reason. We all know what happened there and giving fine details about that nightmare wouldn’t lend much of value to the intentions of this history. What they do go into in great detail is how the Holocaust effected the Hasidim, the ways in which it influenced their self-concept as a religious movement, and what it did to change the structures of their communities. Of other great importance is the mass emigration of Hasidim to America and Israel. The most surprising thing to be learned from this book is that many Hasidim, even those who live in Israel, are anti-Zionist. The reasoning behind this is sufficiently explained but still a little hard to grasp for those of us who are outside the community. The experience of their immigration to America is entirely different. Not only are they now forced to live as an anti-modernist movement in a modernist society, but it is a multicultural society as well, a fact that has hurt and helped the Hasidim in many ways. But at the end of it all, the authors demonstrate how the American experience has been a great blessing to the Hasidim because it is the place where they have been able to thrive unlike any other place they have been in the world.

What is really impressive about this book is that it is so easy to follow. With eight different authors, you would expect it to vary in quality and style from chapter to chapter, but that just isn’t the case. The writing is consistent in its pacing and clarity all the way through. Even some of the more esoteric aspects of things like the kabbalah, theodicy, and devekut are explained with enough skill to make them comprehensible to those of us who aren’t so familiar with what they are. The tone is also as neutral as possible; the authors don’t exoticize the Hasidim like a species of strange animal nor do they judge them. They simple describe them and leave it at that. The biggest problem with the book is that it doesn’t provide enough of an insider’s point of view. As a reader, it made me feel like I was voyeuristically watching the Hasidim from a distance through a pair of binoculars. But this is a history book and not a work of social science. To get a better understanding of the experience of Hasidic ritual and practice, I found some good documentaries on the internet to supplement my reading. Some of the Hasidim are incredibly talented musicians and singers.

If you are not a member of the Hasidic community and you want to know what these people are all about, Hasidim: A New History is possibly the best place to start. Not only is it informative about who the Hasidim are, but I think it also goes a long way in explaining what it might be like to be an ethnic or religious minority in America. In conclusion, while I can’t speak for the Hasidim themselves, I do think they could benefit with a little more outreach to other Americans outside their community. It is true that some members of Chabad-Lubavitch are making some attempts at this, I know because I have spoken with a couple of them myself, but we are living in dangerous times when anti-Semitism is on the rise and the Hasidim mark themselves out visually as an American Other. This makes them a prime target for scapegoating by the more ignorant members of our society. As the Crown Heights Affair of 1992 proved, sometimes being the Other in America is not so easy. We should all make an effort to tolerate those who are different from us, but sometimes you have to be the one to initiate that first step. In the end I get the impression that the Hasidim are just a bunch of harmless, regular people like the rest of us. They just happen to live by a different set of rules. Besides, they dedicate their lives to the experience of joy. Shouldn’t that be a part of all our lives anyways?

 

Book Review

Garbage World

by Charles Platt

     “Touch-a touch-a touch-a touch me/I wanna be dirty,” sang Janet Weiss, played by Susan Sarandon, in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It could very well be the theme song of Roach, a character in Garbage World by Charles Platt since it fits his transformation from neat-freak to filth monger as the plot progresses. Roach is the pivot on which the novel turns. It is a book with a simple and unoriginal plot, and it makes a definite statement about class conflict, but it isn’t an entirely serious book and if you read it thatv way, it can be rewarding.

Somewhere in outer space there is a political entity called the United Asteroid Belt Pleasure Worlds Federation. While the asteroids these people inhabit are never fully described, we do learn that they are a high-tech civilization with high living standards, and an abundance of wealth. Their biggest problem is waste disposal. What they do is fill up blimps with garbage and then drop them on another asteroid named Kopra, which is also the Greek word for “feces”. The problem is that so much trash has been dropped on Kopra that the asteroid is fracturing under the weight and will soon break into pieces, spreading all the garbage throughout the immediate surroundings and ruining the cleanliness of the more developed asteroids in the federation.

Roach arrives in a spaceship with his commanding officer Larkin with plans to move the inhabitants of Kopra off the asteroid until they are able to fix it to prevent the catastrophe. The people living on Kopra are led by Gaylord, a giant bearish man with no sense of cleanliness or refinement. He earned his status as leader by accumulating the biggest hoard of junk which he has organized and labeled like pieces in a museum in his basement. His hoard makes Gaylord powerful because he is resourceful enough to know what to do with all his garbage when the time requires it. Larkin and Roach are anal-retentive germaphobes, but Gaylord finds common ground with Roach and a friendship grows between them. Roach also falls in love with Gaylord’s daughter Juliette. Gaylord also has a son named Oliver who leans a little bit more to the clean side and secretly agrees to help Larkin who has not been entirely honest about their mission on Kopra.

Roach is a bit of a humanitarian whose job is to collect information about the inhabitants of Kopra. He goes about studying them like an anthropologist. By that I mean he studies them with all the haughtiness and contempt that anthropologists in the colonial era studied so-called “primitive societies”. Still he cares enough about the Koprans to want to save them from their dirty and lowly status in the universe. Larkin, however, cannot be trusted and his plan is to exterminate the people there along with his efforts to prevent Kopra from exploding and polluting the entire asteroid belt with the filth his people have dumped on Kopra.

There are other inhabitants on the asteroid they call the Nomads. They live in the jungle under much rougher conditions and also survive by scavenging the junk that falls in blimps from the sky. Roach sets out with Gaylord and Juliette to find the Nomads so they can bring them back to the spaceship to be taken away while the asteroid of Kopra gets repaired. However, somebody sabotaged their vehicle and they come close to death, but the nomads save them from disaster. T o their surprise, the nomads turn out to be peaceful and hospitable people. The whole middle section of this novel is a series of adventures in the strange and dirty landscape of Kopra. Along the way, Roach begins to respect the Koprans more and more as he becomes accustomed to being dirty and gradually adapting to the environment of filth.

Roach’s transformation is complete when he falls into a warm mud pit with Juliette and the two get it on, having some truly dirty sex. This was actually my favorite part of the novel; Platt’s description of love making while submerged in warm and slimy mud was actually quite arousing. It wasn’t overly described either. There was just enough there to give you the tactile sensation necessary to make Kopra seem like it could actually be a nice place to visit. Needless to say, Roach has gone native at this point and, for him, there is no turning back.

Beyond that, I will just say you have to read the book to find out what happens.

Garbage World is a lot like the pulp science-fiction adventure stories of the 1920s and I am sure the author was aware of that. Those stories often had a colonialist mentality either latent or overt. A courageous spaceman travels to another planet or another dimension and encounters tribes of dangerous creatures that often bear the physical characteristics of non-European people. The hero falls in love with a local female and manages to escape before getting chopped up and eaten, killed by bug-eyed monsters, or flayed with primitive lasers. Garbage World turns this whole fictional paradigm on its head. In the post-colonial 1970s, there were more than a few social scientists pushing the idea that colonial subjects were just as human as the colonists and deserved to be treated as such. Charles Platt obviously took a cue from this change in attitudes and wrote Garbage World. It is an obvious critique of the way people in developed countries treat people in the Third World. The people of Kopra are portrayed as being resourceful and intelligent enough to make the most of their living conditions, even thriving on Kopra, finding happiness and the full realization of their human potential. Meanwhile the neat-freaks who invade their territory are the ones who created the conditions on Kopra and then plot to destroy them for being dirty, useless, and primitive. The dirty people of Kopra are the good ones while their technocratic adversaries reveal a link between colonialism, fascism, and obsessive cleanliness. By the end of the book, dirtiness is a virtue and Kopra looks like a borderline utopia. This book also reflects the growing concerns over ecology and environmentalism of the times in the 1970s.

Charles Platt’s Garbage World is a simple book on the surface. It was written primarily for entertainment. But when looked at in the context of the time when it was written, and the chronological space it holds in the progression of science-fiction writing, it makes a definite humanitarian statement. Despite the statement it makes, it is not a serious work of literature and it should not be approached as one. But if read solely for fun, the morality of the story may come out a lot more strongly. So go ahead and read it for fun and see what happens. Just don’t hide it under your mattress so your mother won’t find it; it’s not that kinds of a dirty book. And if anybody ever wants to have some filthy sex in a warm mud puddle, remember this book and don’t deny yourself that opportunity. 

 

Book Review

The Rochester Mob Wars

by Blair T. Kenny

     Ah Rochester, my hometown. The weather is harsh. The people are chronically ill tempered and unfriendly as wellas insular, provincial, and myopic. One of Rochester’s nicknames is Smugtown. The most popular food here is the Garbage Plate. It’s the eastern edge of the Great Midwestern Rustbelt. It’s the kind of place that produces serial killers like Arthur Shawcross and the Hillside Stranglers; Timothy McVeigh was living in the suburb of Webster when he decided to go to war against the US government. It’s the city where Jimi Hendrix got booed offstage, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Buddy Rich got arrested for possession of cocaine, and Billy Idol got arrested for attempted sexual assault. It’s also a haven for record collectors boasting of legendary stores like the House of Guitars, the Record Archive, Lakeshore Record Exchange, the Bop Shop, and Buzzo’s in Geneseo. We’re also the birthing ground for such musical luminaries as Cab Calloway, Wendy O. Williams, Kim Gordon, Lydia Lunch, the Chesterfield Kings, and Mitch Miller. Road construction is endless and we’ve got potholes in the road the size of elephant heads. It was once the hometown of Rob Black of Extreme Associates, a pornographer who made such extreme content that Larry Flynt told him to tone it down a few notches; he went to prison on obscenity charges. On the brighter side, Mt. Hope Cemetery has got to be one of the most beautiful boneyards in the country and a great place for drug parties and sexual trysts in the moonlight; it is the burial ground of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. There should be no surprise that such a sordid place would have its own arm of La Cosa Nostra, especially with its sizable population of ethnic Sicilians.

If you were around here in the 1970s, you are probably aware of the car bombing that killed Sammy G Gingello and the string of shootings which are documented in Blair T. Kenny’s The Rochester Mob Wars. The author does a historical service to this small town with a big attitude, documenting a side of life that wouldn’t surprise anybody from this region. But beyond simple documentation, this short book is a chore to read.

The story of this band of Goombatas is nothing unique. The Mafia demanded protection money from a handful of illegal gambling dens while involved in various other forms of crime. When the local big boss, Frank Valenti, was given an all-expenses paid vacation up the river courtesy of the local police force who, as we all know around here aren’t a whole lot different from other gangs, the Mafia split into three factions dubbed by the police as the A Team, the B Team, and the C Team. The A Team controlled all the rackets while the B Team rebelled against them and tried to seize control. The C Team was just around to cause more trouble.

Frank Valenti rose up in the ranks, having ties to the mob in Pittsburgh and the Bonanno Faimily in New York City. When he went away for a while, he put the slow-witted and unimaginative Tom Didio in charge of the B Team, thinking he would be easy to control from prison and ready to step down upon the boss’s return. But Didio wouldn’t budge and all hell broke loose. Didio was gunned down in the parking lot of the Blue Gardenia restaurant in Irondequoit. This was followed by car bombings, arson, and lots of shooting.

The book also mentions some ties to Hells Angels chapters from as far away as Tennessee and Georgia and Mafia infiltration of the Teamsters Local #398 which eventually was liquidated by the government for being mob controlled, although Blair Kenny doesn’t say a whole lot about what the paisanos did when they ran the labor union rackets.

I suppose it all sounds interesting, especially if you come from the great city of Rottenchester. However, this book is so poorly written that any excitement you might get from it is beaten down like a day at Charlotte Beach that got ruined by a heavy rainstorm or possibly even by the stench from the polluted water, making the air around Lake Ontario smell like a sewer. The whole thing reads like paperwork from a police department’s filing cabinet. Actually, the author just seemed to indiscriminately throw together a bunch of newspaper clippings from the local rag known as the Democrat & Chronicle, merely summarizing them as he went along without any effective narrative scheme or organization. You get the same stories, largely lacking in detail, repeated over and over again without much information about who any of these people are or why we should even be interested in them. Finally at the end, Blair Kenny rewrites the whole story into a coherent narrative as some sort of summary, but at that point it is too little too late to save the entire book from itself.

As someone who grew up in Rochester, this book is mildly interesting. I know all the neighborhoods and suburbs where the action took place; most of them are in neighborhoods you should avoid these days. I recognize the names of some police officers and journalists in the story, including Gordon Urlacher, the police commissioner who went to prison for embezzling money from the police department in the 1990s. I can remember hearing rumors about Charlie the Ox when I was a teenager. Several of the people here share last names with kids I was friends with in grade school. And yet there is no mention of the Garibaldi Gardens or the Rio Bamba. But other than that, this is such a poorly written book that it won’t be of much interest to most readers; it probably will appeal only to those fascinated with the most obscure elements of Mafia lore or those with especially low standards in reading materials. Any time you see that a book is self-published, proceed with caution.