JEWS ON VIEW

JEWS ON VIEW

AMERICAN EXPOSURES: PHOTOGHAPHY AND COMMUNITY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

BY LOUIS KAPLAN

MINNEAPOLIS: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 2005

248 PP./$78.00 (HB), $26.00 (SB)

BAR MITZVAH DISCO

BY ROGER BENNETT, NICK KROLL, AND JULES SHELL

NEW YORK:

256 PP./$23.95 (HB)

FAR FROM ZION: JEWS, DIASPORA, MEMORY

BY JASON FRANCISCO

PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2006

128 PP./$49.50 (HB)

The JEWISH IDENTITY PROJECT: NEW AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY

BY SUSAN CHEVLOWE

NEW YORK! THE JEWISH MUSEUM/YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005

232 PP./$40.00 (SB)

RASSIS: THE MANY FACES OF JUDAISM

BY GEORGE KALINSKY

NEW YORK: UNIVERSE/RIZZOLI INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS, 2002

208 PP./$39.95 (HB)

Despite second Commandment strictures against making "graven images," photography finds itself recruited in the Sisyphean quest for postmodern religious identity. Across styles and genres, still photography has been sent to the front lines in the battle against an agnostic ontological insecurity, a particularly odd phenomenon given that so many of the identity issues in popular culture are more readily referenced in terms of tastes in music or film.

This quest is rendered more complicated for Jews because, as a collectivity, they-we-are simultaneously foundational and yet marginal to western civilization; cosmopolitan citizens of the world yet exiles throughout the globe; a tribe that shares a universal folk tongue-Yiddish-but one that is on the endangered languages list. A people of both the monotheistic promise and the theological curse, Abrahamic insiders yet deicidal outsiders, Jews experienced the paradox of nationhood without physical territory until 1948. As an essence and an absence, Jews represent the epitome of transcendent homelessness, functional postmodernists' avant l'id?e. It is little wonder that the major comic superheroes, from Superman to Spiderman to the X-Men, have been invented by assimilated Jewish artists such as Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber) and Jack Kirby (originally Jacob Kurtzbert). The hypermasculine figures they created were granted both the grandiosity of godlike strength and the discomforts of a life shared with a nebbishy, woman-shy, dual identity.

Moreover, some Jews in the United States currently find themselves in an unusual political place right now, receiving the active political support of many millennial Christians for Israeli militarism, and witnessing the initiation of several celebrities into the ancient mystical tradition of the Kabbalah and the attempted connection with Jesus's roots by some fundamentalist ministers as they don ritual prayer shawls and tefilUn. It is unexpectedly cool to be a "Hebe" in some circles, as the title of a new magazine puts it.

Amidst all this ambiguity, the Jewish Museum in New York City commissioned an exhibit, later developed into a book, based on ten photographic, video, and multimedia installation pieces. The book, The Jewish Identity Project New American Photography by Susan Chevlowe, begins by acknowledging predecessors such as Edward Steichen's 1955 project "The Family of Man." Accompanying essays by Dan Stavans and others pose the key question of whether postmodernist multiculturalism can be reconciled with the wish to retain some distinctive collective identity. In response, the visual artists offer everything from fairly traditional portraiture to "choreographed" multiple images, from family photo albums with written interviews to shoot-from-the-hip-with-a-wide-angle street shots, from staged theatrical poses to the theatricality inherent in standard wedding photography, from architectural rendering to ironic Candida. Under the portentous subtitle, "New American Photography," much of the work intersects self-conscious artiness with self-conscious Jewishness, but many of the portfolios do little to strike the viewer as aesthetically or conceptually innovative. The few that could have done so essentially fall short of the mark. In Nikki Lee's series "The Wedding" (2005), for example, an Asian woman happily marrying into an apparently traditional Jewish family is often shoved into the corners of the frame. The women in Yoshua Okon's series "Casting: Prototype for a Stereotype" (2005) look less surrealistic than ridiculous. Finally, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher's "Brooklyn Abroad" (2005) series makes Hasidim appear as stiff and out of place as possible as they relocate to Iowa to operate a kosher meatpacking plant. One closes the book wondering how different visual projects on any other bicultural identity might actually look.

In contrast, Jason Francisco's portfolio employs a coffee-table book format and somber monochrome prints to brood over the dispersion of a once-flourishing Ashkenazic civilization. A true work of mourning and melancholia, as Freud would have it, Far from Zion: Jews, Diaspora, Memory (2006) interpretatively documents its full share of gravestones and cemeteries, desolated synagogues, troubled faces, and nearly obscured railroad tracks leading to crematoria. A far more empathetic approach to diaspora problematics, it reminds the viewer of the special place of memory within Hebrew theology and Jewish tradition and therefore provides a stronger rationale for the use of photography in constructing narratives about identityat least in the sense of identities that have now been lost.

George Kalinsky has served as official photographer for Madison Square Garden and his collection of portraits of rabbis from around the world, Rabbis: The Mary Faces of Judaism, is more than aesthetically competent. Each of the one hundred images is accompanied by autobiographical statements, many of which sound self-promoting. Indeed, with prefatory remarks by Senator Joseph lieberman and actor Kirk Douglas, the book feels quite status conscious. More an assemblage than a collection, Kalinsky's book gives us the stand-up comedian rabbi, the licensed Israeli tour guide rabbi, the radio show host rabbi, the Asian American woman rabbi, the karate rabbi, the jogger rabbi, the surfer rabbi, the firefighter rabbi, the African drum-beating rabbi, etc. Only one, the singing cowboy rabbi, Joe Black of Albuquerque, is shown in close contact with a living creature, namely his horse. The rest inhabit libraries, studies, sanctuaries, or street scenes-places often illuminated largely by artificial lighting. The book is overwhelming, similar to a family photo album of intimidating folks you should recognize but do not really know.

Far more familiar and accessible are the self-selected photographs submitted to the editors of Bar Mitzvah Disco, tied together with a brief introduction by those kings of campiness, the Village People. During the 1980s, when the Hasidim in Crown Heights were eagerly awaiting the return of the Messiah, their more secularized brethren out on Long Island were nervously checking their Rolexes for the arrival of the caterers, the D.J., the ice sculptors, the professional party planners, and, in one case, the baby elephant. It was the height of the interminable Reagan-Bush era, a time when sociologists were tripping themselves over examples of "conspicuous consumption" with the repeal of luxury taxes on yachts and, from the looks of it, on over-the-top, themed bar and bat mitzvah parties as well.

If Jewish identity was not sufficiently ambivalent at that point, these themed events add in the natural confusions of an upwardly mobile petit-bourgeois and middlebrow culture. And the 120-roll Bronicas, Koni-Omegas, and Mamiyas are everywhere, capturing all the accoutrements of an exhuberantly arriviste culture-sequined dresses, sign-in boards, smorgasbords, limbo dancing, and enough eye shadow, hemoglobin-red lipstick, and blue mascara to keep the entire Third World in bad fashion. Here one finds the record of an American Judaism almost entirely freed of melancholia except for the ancient, wizened zayeds (grandparents) appearing like confused aliens who dropped in for what they thought was a religious function. If the Jewish Museum poses the question of the relationship between ethnic identity and aesthetics, Bar Mitzvah Disco has already answered it: lots of generic pictures of pubescent youth surrounded by glitz, sentimentality, nods to piety, and enthusiastic immersion in mass media iconography. High art seems mute and under-resourced by comparison.

Explicitly influenced by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (France's new maitre de pensee, or master of thought), Louis Kaplan provides a far more intellectualized tour through this terrain in his American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century. Nancy's La Communaut?; D?s?uvr?e (The Inoperative Community, 1982) made the ingenious argument that the concept of community lies at the heart of modernist philosophy, defining community in terms of political resistance to coercive power. Clearly, Nancy's thought owes much to both Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, but his and Kaplan's associations between photography and mortality represent material well-trodden by many, from Beaumont Newhall to Susan Sontag. And when Kaplan quotes one of Nancy's formulations"The community that becomes a single dung necessarily loses the in of being-in-common. Or, it loses the with or the together that defines it. It yields its being-together to a being of togetherness. The truth of community, on the contrary, resides in the retreat of such a being" (xx)-one recalls John Dewey's snarky musing that German philosophy might have been entirely different if the language itself did not capitalize every noun.

Moreover, this sort of inquiry tends to run aground in an era of both Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" (2000) and the appropriation of the term "community" itself as a substitute for "professions" or "interest groups"-as in the "art museum community," "the banking community," and even "the military intelligence community." Phenomenological speculations aside, Kaplan does have his finger on the pulse to the extent of which postmodernism generates new ontologies on a regular basis. In his chapter on "Slashing Toward Diaspora," Kaplan dwells on die well-known staged/documentary photographs of Frederic Brenner, who finds or manufactures visual double-entendres on stereotypical Jewish identity. Some of Brenner's captions are explicit: for example, "Jewish Lesbian Daughters of Holocaust Survivors, with Their Mothers, NYC, 1994"; "The December Dilemma, Colan Family, Staten Island, NY, 1993"; and "Minyan of the Stars, Sukkah in the Sky, NYC, 1994." Others pun with references to "Jews on Hogs" (Harley-Davidsons); "Nice Jewish Boys, Palm Beach, Florida, 1994" (an African American and Hispanic moving company); "The Hebrew Academy, Las Vegas" (assembled next to the Luxor Hotel's famous Sphinx in Las Vegas); "Survivors" (of radial mastectomies); or "Marxists" (Groucho Marx imitators).

What Kaplan wishes to extract from all this is an argument concerning the existential differences between the status of Jewish Americans and that of Jewish/Americans. While the former envisions a comfortable assimilationism, the latter positions Jewish identity "between," in a manner that becomes emblematic of other diasporic identities. Hence, Jews exist between "white" and "nonwhite," "conventional" and "unconventional," "niceness" and biker "hostility," to which the Jewish Museum counterposes a famous saying by the late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban, "We Jews are just like other people, just a little more so."

Yet in all this discussion, Kaplan minimizes the extent to which the camera remains complicit with de-essentialized postmodern identities now built around theatricality and display. Indeed, if the images in the books discussed have anything in common one would have to find it in the self-conscious staginess of Kalinsky's rabbis, the bar mitzvah princes-for-a-day, and the majority of the work in The Jewish Identity Project. Only Francisco's bleak landscapes and intimate portraits posit a more spontaneous "authenticity." Yet from televangelists to legal battles over the display of religious monuments, to cinematic spectacles such as The Passion of the Christ (2004, by Mel Gibson), postmodern religiosity seems less private and more about performance-especially mass media performance.

One therefore comes away from these images and texts wondering about the extent to which "community" or even "congregation" now means "appreciative audience." Photography, with its sites of fairly privatized viewing-the photo album, catalog and book, museum wall-may represent a remaining space for interiority and contemplation. But the real action for Jews, and others, seems to remain somewhere beyond the frame.