Hey, beloved tribe.
Well, we seem to be at war, full-throttle, with Hezbollah. This isn’t unexpected, of course, but still daunting and frightening. Israel has an existential need for her wars to be short. Her economy can’t sustain extended battle without straining nearly to the breaking point. She doesn’t have the manpower to replace exhausted soldiers with fresh and rested ones. And we have already been at war with a lesser enemy than Hezbollah for nearly a full year, which is much longer than any other war in Israel’s history.
I wish I had something smart and reassuring to say but I don’t have much beyond my conviction that we will survive and prevail, come what may.
September 11th has just come and gone, and on that day I was thinking about what the NYC’s Fire Commissioner said after we lost hundreds of firefighters that day — some of them among the very best the FDNY had. Commissioner Von Essen told the city during a press conference: “The Fire Department will recover, but I don’t know how.”
And that’s how I feel right now. Israel will prevail in these wars and survive as the Jewish nation, even if some of our most excruciating days are ahead of us.
The friend I’m staying with told me today that her mantra this year has become the one I’ve invoked often in this newsletter, the Kol Ha’Olam Kulo:
All the world is a narrow bridge; the essential thing is not to be afraid.
*
My stay in NYC is eight days long and every single day is scheduled end to end and still it doesn’t feel like I have enough time here. For every beautiful, beloved person I’ve spent time with, there is another I’m dying to see but can’t.
And I have two Jewish stories that feel related, even though they took me in opposite directions, and I wanted to tell them here to see whether I can distill them into anything serviceable.
But before I can relate either of these stories, I need to provide the context.
Almost every single person, place and event on my NYC schedule has been Jewish. I’ve had dozens of separate encounters and I think there’s only a single exception to this rule: as strange as it might sound, this past weekend I spent both my afternoons in a clown workshop.
This 2-day class mostly attracts professional and aspiring actors. I first read about it two years ago in a memoir titled Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir (I remember my pleasure in the book was diminished by the gratuitous snipes at Israel that were interspersed throughout, but that really has no bearing on this story).
Here is the part that intrigued me, from its opening pages:
After my first day of clown school, I tried to drop out. The instructor was provoking us in a way that made me uncomfortable: to the nervous, smiley woman, “Don’t lead with your teeth”; to the young hipster, “Go back to the meth clinic”; and to me, “I don’t want to hear your witty repartee about Oscar Wilde.”
I was the only non-actor in the program and had made the mistake, as we went around the circle on the first day, of telling everyone I was a psychoanalyst writing a book about laughter. As part of my research, I explained, I had frequented comedy clubs and noticed how each performance, had it been delivered in a different tone of voice and context, could have been the text of a therapy session.
Audience members, I told them, laughed less because a performer was funny than because they were honest. Of course, that’s not how all laughter operates, but the kind of laughter I’m interested in — spontaneous outbursts — seems to function that way, and clown performances push that dynamic to the extreme, which is why I decided to enroll in clown school, and how I earned the grating nickname “smarty-pants.”
But if I dropped out, I would lose my tuition money. So I decided to stay and, by staying, was provoked, unsettled, changed.
In this context, “clown” is a concept, not a circus role. The clown within is the primal essence of who we are when we strip away our various personas — social, civic, political, professional, etc. — and reconnect with the spontaneity, openness, energy and lack of inhibition we had as small children.
The guiding principle of clown school is: the closer we can come to the authentic, uninhibited, undefended core of who we were originally, the more empowered we are in our adult and artistic lives.
What drew me to the experience is that, in this way, acting and writing are the same. It sounds paradoxical, but the more you protect yourself on the page, the less power you have. Readers won’t warm to you or trust you if you play it safe. There are people so attuned to and impatient with any hint of performance that they won’t even bother with you unless and until you bring your truest self, trembling, to the table. If I could only dispense a single piece of writing advice for the rest of my life, it would be: write as if all your readers are people like this.
I signed up because I also hoped to be provoked, unsettled and changed, in a way that would fuel the work I’m doing.
The two-day class was in Brooklyn and one thing that felt amazing was that the room was full of people of all ages, genders and races, and I would bet money that all of them were liberal / progressive, but it was a completely non-political space. Every single exercise we did depended on trust, interpersonal attunement and — to use an overused and often irritating phrase — a mutual commitment to hold space for each other.
The first day was especially thrilling, euphoric, and the very best thing I could have done would have been to just stay with that feeling all evening. But I had bought a ticket to a debate between Eylon Levy and Mehdi Hasan.
Now, I love Eylon Levy. I have listened to him on the Call Me Back podcast so many times and I wanted to see him live. I wanted to support him. I wanted to show up for him in an atmosphere I knew would be overwhelmingly fraught and hostile.
But I could feel from the first 15 minutes what a mistake it was to come. It was exactly the wrong thing to do after the clown workshop.
The fact that Mehdi Hasan has written a book titled Win Every Argument tells you exactly who he is: smug, insufferable, fundamentally dishonest, completely uninterested in listening or learning anything. To him, an argument is not an opportunity to grapple with other angles of an issue, consider another viewpoint, practice empathy or exchange perspectives. It’s only a game to “win”.
I’ve heard him debate many other people I deeply admire: Mosab Hasan Youssef, Einat Wilf, Douglas Murray, Natasha Hausdorf. He said nothing new in this one, and like our Republican frontrunner, he avoided even answering many of the moderator’s questions. He interrupted Eylon incessantly, talked over him and out of turn again and again, and refused to engage with any question he did not want to, or could not, answer.
I had to ask myself why I was spending my evening like this. At the end of the event, the moderator asked the audience of hundreds whether anyone had changed their mind about any aspect of the conflict. Not a single hand went up.
I resolved never to attend anything like that again. It was worse than a waste of time; it was actively counterproductive. We should not engage with people who have no essential goodwill, either directly or by proxy. I will gladly listen to Eylon Levy in any other context, but not a reductive verbal brawl that serves no earthly purpose. And that goes for internet arguments too. I very rarely engage in them and when I do, it’s when I think the other person is truly open to a dialogue.
The next day — day two of the workshop — I had planned to spend my lunch break interviewing another workshop participant. The day before, this person — whom I’ll identify only as K. — mentioned her profession, which I’d never heard of, and I was fascinated by the sound of it. I’m sorry to be so vague, but as this story unfolds, you’ll understand why.
I went up to her and said: “I know this is out of left field, but do you happen to be Jewish?”
She said: “Yes! I am Jewish!”
I said: “Oh good, because I was hoping I could interview you for my Jewish magazine.” I explained my Jews of the Universe column and she was excited to be featured.
During our recorded conversation, we talked about her profession for around 30 minutes, during which it emerged she was a student at Cornell. I said, “I know this is a detour, but I just have to ask you what it’s like being Jewish at Cornell right now, given all that’s been going on.”
She looked confused. “What do you mean?”
I clarified that I meant the protests. She said, no, the protests didn’t bother her — that she, too, wanted a ceasefire.
I have no doubt that many of the protestors really do just want peace, I said. But what about all the people who explicitly support Hamas?
I’m not aware of anyone who supports Hamas at Cornell, she told me.
“Well,” I said, “there’s Professor Russell Rickford, who held an impromptu rally on campus in the immediate wake of the October 7th massacre, and told the students he found it ‘energizing’ and ‘exhilarating.’ Do you not consider that pro-Hamas?”
“Yeah, I know about that,” she said slowly. “I guess I’d say… I understood the context in which he said that.”
I sat there for a long moment, wondering how in the world to make sense of that statement. Finally I asked: “Can you think of a single other scenario where a professor could tell a group of students he felt energized and exhilarated about the brutal torture and massacre of a huge number of civilians, including many children, and keep his job? Because he was welcomed back to Cornell and he’s teaching there right now.”
She sat there looking like a deer in the headlights for several seconds, and then finally conceded: “No.”
“But going to a school where a person like that is on faculty doesn’t make you feel freaked out, threatened, or affronted in any way?”
“I mean… no. It doesn’t.”
She then asked if we could not talk about this topic anymore, but go back to talking about her work. I suggested we end the interview altogether.
The irrational thought I had was: she’s not really Jewish!
Before the interview she’d told me that only her father was Jewish, but that she identified as Jewish herself, even if she was unobservant and had no Jewish education. I was totally on board with this. I’m not Orthodox, and if a Jew by patrilineal descent identifies as Jewish, then I consider them Jewish.
But after she said Professor Rickford’s words hadn’t bothered her, I could no longer think of her as one of us. And I certainly didn’t want her in my magazine.
Just the day before, I had cherished this space where we had all checked our political selves at the door. And just as I regretted going to the debate, I regretted asking her about what it felt like to be a Jew on the Cornell campus right now. Because when I walked back into the clown workshop, that room no longer held its former purity for me. I had felt this huge rush of love for everyone in that class, but now my feelings about her were tainted.
I’ve been wrestling with these two stories ever since they happened. I am absolutely not a person who turns off the news so I can enjoy my life without all the distress that comes with political realities. I never want to be that person. And yet my experience of clown school was undeniably marred by veering into the political in both instances.
I don’t have a moral to these stories. I’m just letting these different facets of myself remain side by side, in uncomfortable proximity.
This, too, is part of what it’s like to be Jewish in America right now.
I know I’m putting this out late but it’s still Monday on the west coast. I’ll be back with you on Wednesday. In the meantime, look out for the fiction in JUDITH tomorrow — it’s a knockout.
And if you’d like to learn more about clowning — which I highly recommend — the founder of that school, Christopher Bayes, wrote a book titled Discovering The Clown, available wherever books are sold.
Much love to you all, from my inner clown to yours.
Am Yisrael Chai.
Thanks Elissa, for always bringing your truest self, trembling, to the table...
What a mix of experiences! The Cornell student’s responses are disturbing. Yet, you handle it all with so much grace.