Two Jewish Poems by Mordecai Martin

I started taking my writing seriously by taking poetry seriously, spending time in workshops and reading collections. I never published any poems. I never felt they were strong enough to submit, but I wrote them, including two that feel pressing today. One was my response to the Squirrel Hill shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA, which robbed us of 11 mostly elderly Jews. Today is the 5th anniversary of that terrible shooting. The other is a poem about giving up Zionism, the creeping sense of dread that led to it, and the exuberant freedom I found on the other side of that toxic political ideology. I share them both here now.

Squirrel Hill

Awkwardly
meet me at the fringes of our prayer shawls
Lightly grazing each other’s lives
Shuffling to stand
In carefully prescribed distances from each other
Neighbor and Brother
You bow, then I bow
So it looks like I know when to bow

Anxieties of a Jewish poet
Do I say ציתצית?
“Fringes of our prayer shawls” is lovely, tender, liminal
But a translation
Why should I translate myself for them?
What did they ever translate for me?

A pillar of the community holds up what, exactly?
When it falls, what comes crashing down with it?

Liver-spotted hands shake mine
Shkoyach!
Liver-spotted hands tremblingly spread schmear on a bagel

I say, “I dreamt of world without Jews. I couldn’t tell you what was different, but there was no point to anything anymore.”
You say, “We will replace our enemies”
I say, “The first law of the world is fear and so the second is kindness.”
You say, “The nature of the book is to humble, but humility is not always wise.”
“A bris is the first, important betrayal, a fundamental admission of weakness from the parents,” I say.
“They are declaring that they can’t save you when God wants you to bleed.”
You say, “You have cream cheese in your beard. Nope, it’s whitefish salad.”

Foolishly, I once recommended the abolition of Kiddush
To spare us all the anxiety
Where would you be then, my Brother? When would I hear from you?

I’ll see you next week.

I Stopped Being A Zionist!

A Poem in 12 tribes that are all Israel. Cut out each sentence and fill the blank with each one, until the filled in blank is a mirror. 

I stopped being a Zionist! because ________


From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.

Most Jews break my heart.

I suspect the side that’s quibbling about what precisely IS ethnic cleansing of being up to no good.

Olives taste best without ash.

Zionism got boring real fast, in a sort of insidious way.

Golda Meir called the Mizrahi Black Panthers, a movement for economic and legal parity between European and North African Jews, “not nice boys”

I saw a documentary once which made an earnest argument that Moshe Dayyan is somehow magnanimous for not blowing up the Temple Mount.

I would be a terrible soldier.

We all must break our fathers’ hearts.

There are brothers who sit on opposite sides of a wall, not seeing each other for decades at a time. The brothers love one another. The wall has holes in it but the holes are full of soldiers

I trust Palestinians and other people when they say they don’t want to hurt Jews. I have been wrong before. Still, God only asks for trust from us. 

I saw a nasty glint in my friend Benny’s eye one day, and it never went away.

The First Time I said Free Palestine

My sister sent the family chat a D’var Torah, a holy word of teaching, this morning. She said it encapsulated many of her feelings in the last few weeks of sorrow and war. While I found the word of Torah quite beautiful and well written, I did find it to fall short in several ways to address what I feel is necessary to be said in this moment, namely, that what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza is a genocide, atrocious and unforgivable, and that we should all pray for and work towards a Free Palestine. I thought back on my own career of teaching Torah, which I have been fortunate to do in many communities, including my most recent synagogue, Minyan Dorshei Derekh as part of the Germantown Jewish Centre in Mt. Airy, Philadelphia, where I used to live. Here is a piece of Torah I felt was necessary to teach there when Gaza was bombed in May of 2021. I share it here, in hopes of showing what Torah can be learned when we open our hearts and minds to the liberation of all people, and refuse to benefit from the oppression of anyone.

Hello, good Shabbos. Thank you for allowing me once again to give the Dvar Torah here. I sometimes don’t take the time for Torah study that I should, and it always centers, calms and uplifts me when I do manage to take the time to read the Torah portion, think on it deeply, and bring back a reflection on it to my community here at Dorshei Derekh. And I’ve needed centering, calming and uplifting these last few weeks, as the state of Israel, which makes extensive claims to represent the people Israel, proceeds to violently destroy lives in Gaza until in the ominous terms of Defense Minister Benny Gantz, “There is complete quiet.”

If you’ll forgive me for working back to front, at the end of our Parasha, Nasso, there is a verse that confounds the Hebrew grammarians. וּבְבֹ֨א מֹשֶׁ֜ה אֶל־אֹ֣הֶל מוֹעֵד֮ לְדַבֵּ֣ר אִתּוֹ֒ וַיִּשְׁמַ֨ע אֶת־הַקּ֜וֹל מִדַּבֵּ֣ר אֵלָ֗יו מֵעַ֤ל הַכַּפֹּ֙רֶת֙ אֲשֶׁר֙ עַל־אֲרֹ֣ן הָעֵדֻ֔ת מִבֵּ֖ין שְׁנֵ֣י הַכְּרֻבִ֑ים וַיְדַבֵּ֖ר אֵלָֽיו׃. We have three uses of the root “diber” “to speak” here. The one that many of the commentators find puzzling is the middle מִדַּבֵּ֣ר. The vowel is not quite right, it should be ‘midaber eilav’ ‘Speaking to him’ not ‘meedaber eilav’ meaning . . . what exactly? The midrash comes in to say, read not meedaber, but mitdaber, a reflexive verb. Which raises the interesting, potentially mystical possibility that the voice that issues from between the cherubim on the arc of the covenant, the voice that Moshe hears, the Divine Voice . . . is talking to Itself. That God never addresses Moses, that the Eilav, to Whom God is speaking is God. That the commandments, the stories, the wisdom that flowed from the Divine to the Human is just an eavesdropping by a sneaky ape like creature. That God has addressed the Torah to Godself, and we are interlopers on a private conversation. Baruch Hashem, that is disproven by the very nature of Revelation at Sinai, the Revelation we celebrated last week, the fact that sometimes Truth thunders from a mountain, is transparent, is everywhere, is unavoidable. 

So we know that God IS talking to Moshe, even if God addresses Godself. But is God talking to us? Rashi quotes a midrash that inside the tent of meeting, within the holy of holies, God’s voice is like thunder, as it was on the mountain. But just outside the boundaries of the Holy, just outside the curtain, if you were to listen in on Moshe and Hashem from a unsacred and profane space? You would hear nothing. There would be, to quote Benny Gantz, “Complete Quiet”

There is a truth we are not hearing, although it is everywhere. We dissemble it, we call it complicated and wall it off behind experts who never seem to name it. But truth is never too complicated to be understood. We ignore the people who speak the truth. We call them foolish, or too young, or too soft hearted, or too innocent and utopic, or too gullible or too ashamed. I’ve been called all that, when I say two words: Free Palestine.


There is something I’m trying to get at here, but I need to say it plainly, without subtlety or allusion. I need to say: It is time to talk to yourself, as God does when God speaks in the holiest of Holies. It is time to have a conversation just between you and your most trusted confidante, the one that lives inside your heart. It is time to hear a new truth in the depths of yourself, maybe something you’re not ready to confront, maybe something you’ve been listening to for a long time. This truth, it may never make it outside the bounds of that conversation inside you, but I hope it does, I hope it comes down like thunder. It is time to hear two words: Free Palestine.

Last night, I went to a rise up shabbat, an action against Apartheid in Israel, put on by some fine young Jews of If Not Now. It was a sparse crowd, often drowned out by the ambient noise around City Hall, and Atenea and I were by far the oldest people there. On the song sheet was a song I have a particular loathing for: We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. What an arrogant song, I always seem to think. How smug, how self congratulatory. But as I was standing next to these brave young Jews, and thinking about how much older I am than them, but how I am only 34, not quite an elder, I found myself thinking about that song, and how there were no elders there to support them. Of course this generation reassures themselves that they are the ones they’ve been waiting for. Who else will come to save them from this world? They are that most terrible thing to see, which we have seen far too often since World War II: A generation of Jews left adrift from their elders. But this time, it is not because their elders were, has v’halilah, stolen from them. It’s because they cannot countenance their elders’ commitment to a militarized state that wages war against a captive population.

I know I’ve been very critical in this dvar Torah, but I do want to teach one more thing, one tiny piece of Torah, from the beginning of the parashah, as I said, I’m working back to front. In the previous parashah, we began a process that continues in this week, where the Levites are divided into families, and those families are given tasks pertaining to the worship of God, and to the disassembling and transporting of the Holy Tabernacle. Many of the families are given sufficient teams of oxen and wagons to carry their loads, but the Bnei Kohath, that is, the cousins of Moses and Aaron, are told they will carry the most sacred things throughout the wilderness, the Ark of the covenant, and that they will carry it, wrapped in a holy cloth, like our torah, and they will carry it, on their shoulders. These holiest of things can never be roughly thrown on the back of an ox, they can’t be hauled about as if they’re just anything. They have to be handed around, one to another person. These are the holy truths that have reached me, handed to me by everyone in this shul, every Jew I’ve ever met here. These are the holy things that I learned from you all. I am lucky, to have you all, to be in community with you, to struggle with and alongside you as we attempt to live in Peace, in Justice, and in a world with a free Palestine

In lieu of discussion, I will be reading the known names of the children who have been killed by the Israeli army in the assault on Gaza, over the last couple of weeks:

Mohammad Saber Ibrahim Suleiman, Age 15
Baraa Wissam Ahmad al-Gharabli, Age 5
Mustafa Mohammad Mahmoud Obaid, Age 16
Rahaf Mohammad Attalla al-Masri, Age 10
Yazan Sultan Mohammad al-Masri, Age 2
Hussein Muneer Hussein Hamad, Age 11
Ibrahim Abdullah Mohammad Hassanain, Age 16
Marwan Yousef Attalla al-Masri, Age 6
Ibrahim Yousef Attalla al-Masri, Age 11

Lina Iyad Fathi Sharir, Age 15

Rashid Mohammad Rashid Abu Arra, Age 16
Hamza Mahmoud Yassin Ali, Age 12
Yahya Mazen Shehada Khalifa, Age 13
Hamada Attia Abed al-Emour, Age 13
Ammar Tayseer Mohammad al-Emour, Age 10
Bashar Ahmad Ibrahim Samour, Age 17
Zaid Mohammad Odeh Telbani, Age 4
Hala Hussein Ra’fat Rifi, Age 13
Khaled Imad Khaled Qanou, Age 17
Hoor Mo’min Jamal Al-Zamli, Age 2
Ibrahim Mohammad Ibrahim al-Rantisi, Age 7 months
Ahmad Rami Mahmoud al-Hawajri, Age 14
Lina Mohammad Mahmoud Issa, Age 13
Mohammad Salameh Mohammad Abu Dayyeh, Age 9 months
Fawziya Nasser Mohammad Abu Faris, Age 17

Four children of the same family:
Amir Ra’fat Mohammad Tanani, Age 6
Ahmad Ra’fat Mohammad Tanani, Age 2
Adham Ra’fat Mohammad Tanani, Age 4
Ismail Ra’fat Mohammad Tanani, Age 7

Butheina Mahmoud Issa Obaid, Age 6
Amira Mohammad Mahmoud al-Attar, Age 6

Mohammad Zain Mohammad Mahmoud al-Attar, Age 9 months
Islam Mohammad Mahmoud al-Attar, Age 8
Mahmoud Hamed Hasan Tolbeh, Age 12
Abdullah Ashraf Abdullah Jouda, Age 12
Mohammad Ahmad Atya Bahar, Age 17

Four children of the same family:
Osama Mohammad Sobhi al-Hadidi, Age 5
Suheib Mohammad Sobhi al-Hadidi, Age 12
Yahya Mohammad Sobhi al-Hadidi, Age 10
Abderrahman Mohammad Sobhi al-Hadidi, Age 7


Yamen Alaa Mohammad Abu Hatab, Age 5
Bilal Alaa Mohammad Abu Hatab, Age 9
Miriam Alaa Mohammad Abu Hatab, Age 7
Yousef Alaa Mohammad Abu Hatab, Age 10
Yara Mohammad Mu’in al-Qawlaq, Age 9
Hala Mohammad Mu’in al-Qawlaq, Age 12
Rula Mohammad Mu’in al-Qawlaq, Age 5
Yazan Rami Riad al-Ifranji, Age 13
Ameer Rami Riad al-Ifranji, Age 9
Mira Rami Riad al-Ifranji, Age 11
Lana Riad Hasan Ishkantna, Age 5
Hana Shukri Ameen al-Qawlaq, Age 14
Yahya Riad Hasan Ishkantna, Age 4
Zain Riad Hasan Ishkantna, Age 2
Zaid Izzat Mu’in al-Qawlaq, Age 8
Qusai Sameh Fawwaz al-Qawlaq, Age 6 months
Adam Izzat Mu’in al-Qawlaq, Age 3
Dima Rami Riad al-Ifranji, Age 15
Tawfeeq Ayman Tawfeeq Abu al-Auf, Age 17
Dana Riad Hasan Ishkantna, Age 9
Ahmad Shukri Ameen al-Qawlaq, Age 15
Tala Ayman Tawfeeq Abu al-Auf, Age 13
Obaida Akram Abdurahman Jawabra, Age 17
Rafeef Mershed Kamel Abu Dayer, Age 10
Yousef Rafeeq Ismail Al-Baz, Age 13
Islam Wael Fahmi Dar Nasser, Age 16
Mina Iyad Fathi Sharir, Age 2
Nagham Iyad Abdulfattah Salha, Age 2
Dima Sa’d Ali Asaliya, Age 10

Ido Avigal, Age 5 and Nadine Awad, Age 16 were killed in Israel

Baruch Dayyan HaEmes, Blessed is the One True Judge, may their memories remain a blessing. 

The Cleft; The Minyan

When I woke up to the war, my wife said, “I don’t want you to be upset.” I was still mostly asleep. “Uh oh,” I said. “Why would I be upset?” “Netanyahu has declared war.” I thought about this for a moment or two. “On who?” I finally ventured. “Palestine,” she said, as if it was natural, obvious, the most Netanyahu thing to do. I scoffed and rolled over, went back to sleep, muttering, “But he doesn’t think Palestinians exist!”

By the time I woke up for real, in my comfortable bed, it was late afternoon in Jerusalem on the 7th, and I didn’t know how many Jews were dead. This is the great comfort that I am accused of by Zionists when I protest the actions of the state of Israel. It’s all the same to you, they say, you comfortable Jew in your big fat bed. What would you do if rockets fell on you? If you had to hide in shelters and be kidnapped and send your children off to the army? And of course, I have no answer for them. I just don’t like guns, and I don’t see the point in Jews swinging them around like we know what to do with them.

I try to remind Zionists of the joke my Yiddish teacher taught me: the Jew who, having proven he’s a crack shot in rifle practice after being conscripted into the Tsar’s army, is sent to the front against the Japanese. He is told to raise the gun, he does. He’s told to aim, he does. He’s told to fire, and he refuses. Three times, this pantomime and insurrection goes through. When the sergeant says, “What’s wrong, soldier?” the Jew responds, “It’s just, there’s people over there.” The Zionists don’t like the joke. They laugh, sometimes, but they don’t really get it, like you and I do. 

So I woke up to the war and I was upset. I was upset all week, but I was always going to be. It was the week of my son’s surgery. My son was born with a cleft lip. Right down the middle, a bit to the left. When I held him, and looked him in the mouth, like one looks at a horse one is buying, I could see his little pink gum, and his lip reached up to his nostril in a jagged left leaning line and then back down. I thought about the old legend of the angel who presses a finger to the lips of the about to be born, and silences them from teaching all the Torah they learned from Hashem in the World Before This World. I thought about Moses’ speech impediment, his “uncircumcised mouth.” I loved that cleft. How could I not? It was my son’s. It was my son. I loved it, and I condemned it to becoming a lip, because the doctors told me he wouldn’t be able to eat or speak. Who needs to eat, I sometimes thought wildly. We have love. Who needs to speak? But we scheduled the operation anyway, so I spent the first week of the war preemptively mourning an absence of an absence, the loss of a split, the death of a cleft. It prepared me well for what was to come.

By the Friday he went in for the surgery, Israel had begun bombing Gaza, giving 1.1 million people 24 hours to flee to nowhere in particular. I kissed my baby and handed him to the surgical team, who if you think about it are just men with very sharp knives, and tried to ignore the television in the waiting room. But they got these things now, iPhones? You just look at them all day. So I knew what was happening. God help me, I was holding my son after major facial surgery and my heart was in Gaza, trying to hold children I’ll never meet. I suppose holding children is like that. You hold one, you want to hold them all. My mother had to scream at me to stop me from going to a protest of the genocide in Gaza that Friday night. I almost ignored her because we don’t agree about politics, but she was right. I held my son and sent my heart to Brooklyn to stand with the Jews on the streets.

The bombs fell. I practiced my Yiddish on the 2 year old Orthodox girl with hepatitis we shared the room with. The bombs fell. My son took oxycontin for the pain and slept, I can only hope, dreamlessly, painlessly. The bombs fell. We got discharged from the hospital. The bombs fell. My wife learned how to clean my son’s nasal stents. The bombs fell. I adjusted the way I hold my son so that he wouldn’t rub his face on my arm. The bombs fell. We held his hands from his face. The bombs fell. 

By Wednesday, my wife and her mother agreed they could spare me for the day. I went to DC to march on Capitol Hill. I thought about what to put on a sign. A line of Yiddish poetry? A piece of Talmud? Eventually time ran out, and I hadn’t even bought cardboard. I went to the Jewish Voice For Peace rally and took a sign that was being handed out, listened to the speakers, tried to shout along. I hate being at a protest, truly. I’m a shmoozer, I like to talk things through. Shouting? In a crowd? Sounds lonesome to me. But I went. I marched. I was part of a mass. There is more than one of me. There are thousands of Jews who say no more of this. Who say not in our name. Who say never again meant never again to anyone. Who say “There’s people over there.” I look at my son’s lip, and I miss something. A cleft. A split, right down the middle. Leans to the left. I hold my son and I pray for the people of Gaza. But like every Jew, I never pray alone.

Midnight A Train

I leave 190th street and a municipal elevator rockets me into the ground where I meet one of those subway trains that wend their way under the earth that I have been riding for much of my life and much of my parents’ lives and much of my grandparents’ lives and much of my great grandparents’ lives. I ride the elevator with a freshly groomed Scottish terrier who is interested in me and his owner who is not. I use a new technology to pay my fare, not a token, not a dime, not a metro card, but my telephone, and if you had told my grandmother that one day we’d use our phones to pay for the subway, she would have been. . . What’s the feeling when you don’t even own a piece of technology, the telephone exists at the corner store, and when your father disappeared for a few days, and then called home from Atlantic City, and then asked to talk to you, his daughter, not his wife, and so your mother, my great grandmother was furious at him, and then a lifetime later your beloved fifth of ten grandchildren summons you from a peaceful rest in eternity to tell you that now he can pay his subway fare with his telephone? My grandmother Pearl died in 2005, a few years before the iPhone, but then again, I bet she could see the writing on the wall, she was a smart cookie.

I take the A express down to West 4th and I make my way through the frozen night to the east village, to Little Poland, where I meet two friends and eat two holuptzes, but they’re covered in mushroom gravy! It’s delicious, and I wonder why I grew up with sweet and sour sauce on my stuffed cabbage, why I miss it, even now that the mushrooms are delighting me; why I need that tang, and the hot burst of the rehydrated raisins. We talk about movies and mental illness and part ways so they can take the Q to Ridgewood and I can take the F to the A to Washington Heights. 

Waiting for the A, I see a strange sight, a young man has sat on the edge of the C train platform, just opposite me, dangling his legs over into the shallow precipe the train will rush through and if he doesn’t move his legs, they’ll be severed, or he’ll be dragged under and he’ll be dead and the train will be delayed. Eventually others notice the young man calmly sitting in peril, and they whisper to themselves and nervously eye the man, the board that says the C train is getting near, their train, which may be delayed by this horror, which may shower them in gore, they’re so close, and otherwise make them complicit, so a few of them surround him and start shouting. They shout “you need to get up” and I do not hear what the man says in response, something like “you need to get out.” An argument ensues, the C train gets closer, and closer, it is now visible to me and people are shouting and it honks its terrible honk and someone has moved as if to grab the man, but the C train has stopped now, and now he’s up, the train pulls the rest of the way in, and the man is asking for money. Angrily the people who tried to save his life, save their subway journey, sweep past him into the now open doors of the train, and a few stop to give him money, and he gets on the train too, still begging, he holds the door open for a moment, costing the train another second, and then the door closes and the C train takes off. Some people look on and think a tragedy was averted and some people look on and think a scam took place, but all I can think is, he had to sit in front of an oncoming train to get people to care who he was, to get his money, and it’s so cold, oh life is hard, it’s so hard, it’s so hard. 

I wrote this on the A Train to 190th street making local stops, hearing Spanish swears and the sweet snores of the man spread out over three seats asleep on his sneakers and the grumbling cyclist who hates the announcements of delays and curses the driver of the train and the driver of the train announcing our delays. It is a quarter past midnight in the subway in New York City. I’m almost home. 

There Goes Funky Flashman: An obituary for Stan Lee

I wrote this on November 12th, 2018 for my now-defunct newsletter, and I’m posting it here in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Stan Lee.

Stan Lee died today, aged 95, outlasting just about anyone who thought of him as anything besides the lovable grandfather of Marvel Comics. Oh, there were always mutterings, of money gone missing, of companies mismanaged, of credit stolen. But c’mon! How could you hate that tremulous twinkle in his eye, that signature ‘stache, the surprisingly strong voice still shouting out lines in blockbuster movie after movie.

I’m thinking about two significant factors in Lee’s own accounts of his work on the Marvel universe, specifically it’s early successes with the Fantastic Four. One, is that he thought the material beneath him. Famously, that’s why he’s Stan Lee, not Stanley Lieber. He was holding onto his given name for his career as a novelist, which he assumed would be where real fame, fortune and glory awaited him. Two, is that he created the characters which are his enduring legacy because he thought no one was paying attention. Marvel Comics-heck, superhero comics in general in the late 50s-was a failing proposition. Lee claimed that it was because his publisher Martin Goodman didn’t think they were gonna make it another month, that he, Lee, was given free reign to create something that nobody had ever seen before.

As usual, it’s not the truth value of these claims that interest me, but what they say about Lee as he created himself, and was in turn created by a comic history that grew up around him. Lee positioned himself, and alternative retellings do the same for his colleagues and compatriots – Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Steve Ditko, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Bob Kane- as the ur-superhero creator. That image was of a scrappy child of immigrants, a New York City street urchin who became a WW2 vet who fought Nazis with a grim smile, and was unmistakably, without exception, Jewish. But where Kirby and Simon took on the gravitas of elder statesmen, Ditko the solemn and mysterious air of a devoted philosopher, and Siegel and Shuster the tragic role of victims of rich men’s machinations, Lee never seemed to lose that sparkle of disrespect, of untrustworthiness, of street-smarts and guile that was the early 20th century Jew’s inheritance from 19th century anti-Semitic characterizations of the Jew as criminal and mastermind. Lee’s public persona is in some ways a defanged Fagin.

So of course Stan Lee was bored and broke and nearly out of a job when he created the characters that have stayed with us this last half-century. Of course no one was looking. When else do scoundrels do their best work? And relatedly, of course Stan Lee is something of a trickster, a thief and a cad. This is not to minimize the extent to which some of his actions caused real pain and damage in his life. Especially notable is the way he and other men of the Marvel Bullpen took credit for hours of work by female artists and writers. It is just to say that as comic history moves on, as we memorialize and eulogize this man, as we come to terms with a complicated legacy, let us remember Stan Lee yes, as a real person with real flaws, but also as a character, a creation of himself, as masterful and complicated and collaborative as any of his others. There is after all, no better tribute to a writer. Excelsior, true believers.

You Can’t Stay Here: An open letter to Mayor Eric Adams

I am trying to end my time in Philadelphia. It has been difficult. I’m trying to sell my house, and no one wants to buy it. Well that’s the way of the market, I suppose. Interest rates and so on. Maybe the basement is damp. Things invisible and visible, that’s what is happening.

I am a mentally ill man. I have spent time in psychiatric care. When I bought this house, it was a great salve to a real fear of mine: that in my muttering, and not bathing, and great cruelty to myself, I would wind up failing to meet my obligations to myself and a landlord, and wind up, somehow, on the streets. That from there, without access to my medications or my psychiatric care and my family, my condition would worsen. That I would meet a gruesome end, in the cold of the street. Perhaps a far off fear, but a real one, that haunted me. Fears are made of the visible and the invisible, what we can see and what we can’t. What is happening and what isn’t.

I am trying to move back to New York City. THE city, we used to call it in my youth in its suburbs, in Westchester. My wife and I, we both love New York so much. It is a kind of infection and a kind of home, something between the two. It is under our skin. It is an invisible and visible thing. We want to get back to it. We are trying to sell my home so that we can return, to my larger home, to the city I love.

In a front page news story, the New York Times reports that Mayor Eric Adams wants to ramp up the City’s ability to coerce the visibly mentally ill on the street into treatment. (Mental illness is also a visible and invisible thing.) The new directive cites that it will affect those who show “unawareness or delusional misapprehension of surroundings.”

Sometimes I get so scared I scarcely know or care where I am. I throw myself to the ground. I talk to myself to soothe myself, to work out a pain inside me. I may strike my face. It’s been a few years, but I can feel these behaviors, just under my skin.

In the front page news story, when discussing the Mayor’s reasoning for his new policy, that might violate the Americans With Disability Act, which will force hundreds into the hospitals – the mayor and governor have ordered 50 whole new beds to be added to the psych wards; Mayor Adams is quoted as saying, “We’re going to find a bed for everyone,” – the newspaper cites “feelings.”

“[A] series of random attacks in the streets and subways has left many New Yorkers feeling that the city has become more unpredictable and dangerous.” (emphasis mine)

“The mayor has defended his focus on public safety and has argued that many New Yorkers do not feel safe. . . ” (emphasis mine)

In my time in psychiatric care, I have learned a lot about feelings. They get votes, not a veto, we say. Let them come, and let them go, we say.

I move through New York and I am happy. I move through New York, and I see sights and sounds and people that fill me with joy and great wonder. I move through New York, and I am safe. So I wonder. Which of us, Mr. Mayor, is showing “unawareness or delusional misapprehension of surroundings?”

The Clinch: Usyk vs. Joshua 2, Jedda, 2022, “The Rage on the Red Sea” (My first live fight.)

I was greeted by mischievous giggles at the door. It was a hot day, even just for the walk from the subway, and Ivan’s three and a half year old, V., ran away almost immediately and hid from me, but looked out curiously from under the dining room table at my sweating hairy bulk. It was the first time I had met her. Ivan and I have hung out sparsely in the last three years. He attended my wedding, but stag, as his wife, Erica, stayed home with the newly born V. I had meant to drop in and get to know the kid, but then there were all my trips to Mexico, and all Ivan and Erica’s to Italy. That’s okay. Things tend to pick up where we left them between Ivan and me. When I’d seen him a year earlier, he’d finally managed to convince me to get into Boxing. Now I had shown up at his apartment to watch my first live fight.

I come to Boxing with almost no experience as a sports fan. As a young child, I would watch my father watching football or baseball, and I’d ask him, “What color are the uniforms of the team we’re rooting for?” That question persisted embarrassingly long after other boys had not only identified whose uniforms were whose, but what team they supported and followed, what players they admired, who they longed to be. I never identified with athletes. Their physical experience of the world always seemed not just alien to me, but dull. Kick, swing, throw, run. Run, kick, throw, swing. Run. Run. So much running. Can’t we slow down? I can’t figure out which little man on the tv is which. I’m still hazy on the rules in most sports. What’s an offsides? What’s a down? What’s a foul line?

Boxing has rules, but they’re blessedly simple, as simple as a punch to the face. They are aphorisms. Above the belt. Good clean fight. Knock out wins. Perhaps more significantly, there are no multitudes of little men that I have to keep my weary eyes on. Just the two, weaving in and out of each other’s reach. Just the two, snapping punches back and forth. Just the two men, holding each other, in the clinch.

When I agreed to watch the fight with him, Ivan sent me the card and recommended I do some research not just on the two heavyweight fighters in the ring, but the shadow over them both: Tyson Fury, the thirty four year old Irish traveler fighter launching his comeback who will surely need to fight the winner of the fight in Jeddah. Fury is a rabelaisian figure I suspect I’ll get to write more about some other time. But for the moment, I’ll stick with my thoughts on Oleksandr “The Cat” Usyk and Anthony “AJ” Joshua. (Disappointingly, though Usyk’s nickname is transparently cooler and weirder, it seems like “AJ” is used far more frequently for Joshua than “The Cat” is for Usyk.)

I’ve never trained to box, and I’ve never been in the ring. I approach this as pure spectator, part of a roaring crowd out for the smell of blood on the canvas. More than I want blood, I want narrative. In that sense, this was a bad fight to start with. Meager bones. The Nigerian-British Anthony Joshua spins a slightly tired and repetitive “rags to riches” story of boxing saving him from his wild and criminal youth. But he also cites an aristocratic background in his Yoruban ancestry, and Ivan’s assessment was that like a prince, Joshua gives off an air of having picked up Boxing the way aristocracy does, alongside horse riding and etiquette. I agreed, and wikipedia’s citation of Joshua’s “goal” to be a multimillionaire off endorsements, his inheritance of the title “Most Marketable Athlete,” sealed the deal for me: I went into the fight ready to dismiss Anthony Joshua as a pretty boy who, if he was in any other sport, would fiercely protect his million dollar face.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk had the humble media presence of the citizen of a country where it’s always a risk to make it into the papers. Here are the two things you can learn about Oleksandr Usyk outside of the ring: He’s Ukrainian from Crimea, part of the Russian-speaking majority, fiercely proud of his country and disdainful of Russia’s annexation and invasion of his home. And he’s a devote Orthodox Christian. He’ll use Christianity to avoid talking about politics, having declared frequently, that, “Crimea belongs to God.” He’s gotten more patriotic of late, joining the Ukrainian defense against the invasion, and the fight was in Jeddah because the Saudis agreed to broadcast it free in Ukraine. But keep an eye on the cross, it became relevant at the end of the fight.

Ivan and I watched Joshua go the distance with Usyk, 12 complete rounds, and ate dinner, and paused the live broadcast to play Rapunzel with V., and put her to bed, and posed questions to each other. “How much do you think one solid heavy weight punch from Anthony Joshua counts for against the flurries of the smaller Usyk?” “Was that a jab or a hook?” “How much is Joshua working his kidneys like that gonna slow Usyk down?” 12 rounds, 12 close rounds. In the end, it was a split decision, with the American judge giving it to Joshua, but the UK and Ukrainian judges agreed with Ivan and me. Usyk outboxed Joshua, a nearly constant display of athleticism and ownership of the ring.

After Joshua’s bizarre speech, which one commentator described as him cutting a promo, pro-wrestling style, Usyk was interviewed while Ivan pointed out the back half of the fight had all the interesting rounds and made to close the computer. But I wanted to watch Usyk’s breakdown of what he had just done, and I wasn’t disappointed. When asked about the fight, Usyk said something along the lines of, “The fight is now history. When people study it, they will study it for the moment I almost lost. That is the moment my God, Jesus Christ, came in and saved me.”

Had we truly just seen a miracle? Usyk thought so. Ivan and I talked about what a higher power can mean to a champion. Then we cleaned up dinner, caught up on each other’s lives, and I headed back out into the night.

I’m going to be writing about boxing more here. I know I’ve been away for a while, and I know this is a strange way to come back. There have been other developments. If you like my writing, but haven’t seen my publications, please go to the link “Published Work” above. But in the meantime, I’ll see you ringside, yeah? Yeah.

After the Destruction, Over the Sea

The other day a friend, knowing my interest in the history of the Suburban Judaism in which I was raised, sent me some prayers written by the reform rabbi Abraham Soltes. Soltes had a fairly typical successful career of a mid-20th century rabbi, serving in a variety of pulpits and chaplaincies throughout the Northeast, including as chaplain of the military academy at West Point. Later in life he added some credentials at Tel Aviv University, and in a corporation.

His prayers are notable for how completely and comfortably they identify Judaism with the project of American Suburbia. One is a “Prayer for American Enterprise”, which he recited upon the opening of a new department store. He invokes God’s blessing for “this great enterprise, whose open shelves and abundant displays symbolize the fruitage of the noble partnership of freemen working together under God[.]” In another, a prayer for the opening game of a little league baseball season, he praises the “Lord of Limb and Spirit” for “having cast our lot in this wonderful land[.]”

It would be easy, as Jewish radicals, or at least, as Jews attempting radicalism in the year 2020, to mock and deride Rabbi Soltes’ contentment in a post WWII America. Easy, too, to judge his and other Suburban Jews complicitness in White Supremacy and White flight and capitalism, to judge their smug, self-serving liberalism. And certainly I’m not advocating that we, as inheritors of this Judaism and its serious flaws and sins, overlook the work that needs to be done in atonement.

But today I’m thinking about what the emotional content and appeal of Suburbia must have been to people of Rabbi Soltes’ generation, which is to say, my grandfather’s generation. How must it have felt, to go through tenements, and the Depression, and the War, and then to find a new life, outside the City? Your family the first family to live in your new split level house. Your feet the first feet to touch your new, fresh lawn. Leaving your parents back on the Lower East Side or in Brooklyn, everyone and everything in your life impossibly young and vital, as you bear children, as you speak English, as you get jobs working as an engineer of jet engines, or spaceships. What must it have felt like, to come through hell, to be the future, deep in this green and growing land? It must have felt like the end of the world.

A Skeptic & The Grey Lady

I am reading the New York Times. In my father’s opinion, it is overdue. Of his three children, only my sister Amy has shared his dedication to the paper. Ever since 10th grade, when my sister realized she could outguess what our social studies teacher would opine about next from the pages of the times, she’s been a daily reader. My elder sister, Julia, was once a frequent reader, but as adulthood’s burdens encroached on her mood and anxiety, she has abandoned the paper for more escapist avenues of infotainment. As for me, I have long preferred my news piping hot from someone I know. That is, I am ashamed to say that for most of my adult life, I have been using social media as my primary news source. I wait for people to react in outrage or amusement or disbelief, and it is with a helpful dose of humanity and pure bias that I ingest the day’s events.

I will say, this has led, yes, to the erosion of American democracy, but also a wonderful sense of superiority to the newspaper. After all, why wait until the Times has a new edition to find out what the president has tweeted? I can just go to twitter. Why wait for the Times to report on the tragic death of a young black man at the hands of police? Facebook live is already at the protest. Verification takes time, and time, well…this is the 21st century: who has time?

It would be nice (it would be publishable!) if this were a story of me learning to love traditional journalism. The fact is, I continue to get my information fresh from my peers on social media. I go to the New York Times for variety. You see, the twitter stream, the facebook timeline, they’re dull. All information, jokes, complaints, poems, outrage, cruelties, acts of love, acts of terror, they all have the same formatting. As Mcluhan taught us, the medium is the message, and one tweet looks much like another, whether it comes from president or proletariat, the same mind numbing bursts of writing. So I have turned to the Times for some variety. A modern love story is illustrated differently than an obituary. Photojournalism essays stand out in stark pictures, one from the other. Articles vary lengths. I am enjoying the leisure of the bourgeousie before his paper, the grand stroll through the world as it exists today. I have come into my inheritance as a New Yorker. I am reading the New York times.

The King is Dead, Again: the Echo of an Obituary

Melvis Kwok died a few days ago, which I know because a rather supercilious New York Times, having reported on the Elvis impersonator in 2010, decided to do a quiet Sunday obituary.  The man who took up the title of the Cat King, Elvis’ Chinese nickname, Kwok was a consummate busker,  parading the neon lit streets of Hong Kong’s Lan Kwai Fong district with serenity and surrealism. Kwok began impersonating Elvis in 1977, the very year the King died. What electric thing passed through the screen, over the many miles between Memphis and Hong Kong? Who knows how a king survives? Of that first encounter via the documentary “Elvis: That’s The Way It is”,  Kwok said “I cried for a long time.” 

This connection, born in tears, played out in lights and sequins, guitars and strangled renditions of It’s Now Or Never is special. As Arthur Miller writes, attention must be paid. It is that strange link between collector and collection, between celebrity and fan, between obsession and obsessed. There are moments when a human being, hidden from the world by his ordinariness-obscured by the simple and transparent fact that he has two eyes, two arms, two legs, and a beating heart, just like everyone else-when such a person becomes a glittering, golden thing. Such was the rise of Elvis, that shining sun. Such was the life of Kwok Lam-Sang, who orbited him and reflected his light. Who might we orbit? When might we rise?