Continuing a 32-Year Conversation With Myself

I've always been a fan of what I call "found object journaling." While most of my journals use freshly purchased wirebound notebooks, I sometimes find and use notebooks discarded by others for my thoughts. Like a crab finding an abandoned shell, I move right in and make somebody else's notebook my literary home for a few months. These notebooks are often from school classes, tossed away as soon as a class ends. They're rare, but they exist.

My latest find is a real gem. I know, because it's my very last class notebook from Princeton University, "Spring '80" written on its yellow cover. After I graduated I held on to it as a record of my closing months at Old Nassau. I knew I had it, but never paid much attention to it until I finished up a volume and decided to use the 40 or so open pages in the massive 130-page, narrow-ruled notebook now. So the classes of the 22 year old me are mixing with the daily thoughts of the 54 year old me. I think of it as a single conversation with a 32-year gap in it.

My classes were the History and Philosophy of Science, English 313 on Literary Criticism (I would have been better off taken a plain old English course rather than one on the criticism of literature), and Religion 348 on Modern Judaism with Ellen Umansky, an excellent teacher who is now a professor of religious studies and the Director of the Carl and Dorothy Bennett Center for Judaic Studies at Fairfield University in Connecticut.

My notes from Umansky's class are riveting because the lectures and precepts marked my first rigorous, academic study of Judaism. Until that point, I had been completely self-taught as I meandered my way into some understanding of Judaism. Now, I had some badly needed guidance.
Writing in an impossibly compact handwriting I can't duplicate now, I jotted notes on the rise of the Jewish Enlightenment. Haskalah, maskilim, the Besht (Isaac Baal Shem Tov), mitnagdim, the Mussar movement, Moses Mendelssohn—they were all covered in just one lecture.

As the notebook rolls on, I can sense the solid organization and the enormous territory covered. A March 3 discussion covered "forerunners of Zionism," going all the way back to the destruction of the first Temple in 586 BCE and marching ahead to the 18th and 19th centuries. Leo Pinsker, Herzl, Peretz Smolenskin, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, Ahad Ha-Am:  the names keep rolling on and coming in between other lectures and classes featuring Coleridge, Hazlitt, Chaucer, Dryden, Johnson, Baudelaire and scientific equations that are completely incomprehensible to me—did I actually understand them at one point?

The notebook marks my keen awareness of the closing of a tumultuous four years of college. I note the months and then days before my senior thesis was due on May 11, 1980. The inside cover has the phone numbers of publications to which I would apply for jobs—the New York Times, the Journal of Commerce, Fortune and Forbes. The inside cover also had the contact for an internship in the office of New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, where I indeed had an interview in Washington with his senior legislative assistant Chester Finn, Jr., now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution focusing on K-12 education issues. He was baffled about why a guy from Texas wanted to work in the office of a New York senator.

Even my doodles are full of meaning, from a drawing I called the "Laughing Centaur" to Grateful Dead song titles "St. Stephen" and "Dark Star" to wistful scribbles of the names Christie, Esther and Barbara (my mind was wandering to romantic daydreams that 30 years later I would turn into a book). There's even a thumbnail-sized sketch of Texas with dots indicating my home town of Mission, no doubt meant to show a classmate where I was from and where I really hoped I would not be immediately returning.

In May, I started the laborious handwritten process of composing "Modern Judaism paper (last one!)" that started with the line, "A hesitant mysticism pervades the Zionist thinking of Mordecai Kaplan and Ahad Ha-Am." That essay concluded my undergraduate education on a high note.

The future relentlessly barreled down on me in the spring of 1980. As challenging as Princeton had been, that future would be even more chaotic when I plunged into the real world of New York life and high-stakes business journalism just days after graduating. The very last page of the notebook has notes on "apartment survival techniques" and hints like "check Salvation Army, places for clothing, furniture" and the almost-poetic "if trouble get lawyer."

And now, 32 years later, I'm still doodling names in margins of notebooks, although I tend to do so in Hebrew and Russian. I still read about Judaism and build on what I learned in Religion 348, and I even attend the outstanding speaker series that Ellen Umansky organizes at Fairfield University. I still like the Grateful Dead and I'm not above picking up a good bargain at Salvation Army and Goodwill stores.

And I'm still writing in notebooks, although these days I prefer the wide-rule format -- they work much better for 50-something handwriting.

Photography on the Border

A theme that cycles through my book, especially the earlier chapters, is life on the border between Texas and Mexico. I very rarely went to Mexico, and for the tamest of reasons. But others went for untame reasons and I heard their conversations growing up. Drugs, cheap liquor and Boystown—the name of the red-light brothel zones.

The rawest reason jumped out at me during a recent visit to, of all places, the International Center of Photography in New York, one of my favorite museums. The exhibit that caught my eye, and took me right back to the banks of the Rio Grande, was a look at the contact sheets of the Magnum photo agency. Contact sheets are direct prints from negatives on to  photo paper, how photographers used to assess their work, finding the best and weeding out the rest.

One of the Magnum contact sheets came from photographs for a book called "Boystown: La Zona de Tolerancia," published in 2000 by Aperture in association with the Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern and Mexican Photography at what was then Southwest Texas State University, now Texas State University-San Marcos.

I have that book.

I have it, moreover, through a surprising process—an accident, a matter of a noontime trip to the Virgin Megastore in Times Square in 2004, before it closed. I worked in the Midtown and always enjoyed lunch breaks at the store, a sprawling multilevel cathedral of music, books and movies. The place had a bin for books that were damaged or unpopular. I glanced at the bin. The big-format book with the black spine and silver lettering that announced "Boystown" practically leaped into my hand. The spine was cracking, the edges were worn, but I didn't care; I would have paid triple the price of $4.99 for this amazing window into the life pulsing on the other side of the river, a world I heard about, but never even got close to experiencing -- not that I ever had a desire to visit the red-light districts of Mexico.

Eight years after getting the book, I saw one of the contact sheets at the ICP. The explanatory text filled in some of the gaps in the book, which kept its geographic details very vague. None of the essays give details about where on the border the photos of prostitutes with drunken gringo frat boys, aging ranch bosses and Mexican workers were taken. The black-and-white photos existed in a feverish neverland that existed somewhere but no place in particular. However, the text for the sheet identified the local as (if I recall correctly), Ciudad Camargo, across from Rio Grande City. The place immediately grounded itself just 30 miles from where I grew up, in Mission.

These days, I doubt too many lonely Anglo ranchers and drunken frat boys are yahooing it across the border for debauched fun as they did in the 1970s when these photos were taken by Mexican street photographers hustling for a buck. The places still exist, but I'm guess the clientele has radically changed. Still, the book captures a place in time, when I was taking notes and starting to write about what was going on around me, on the other side of the river.

"High Art," Odd Jewish (Sort of) Movie

Departing from my usual fare, I had Netflix send me High Art, a 1998 movie set in the drug-addled art-magazine world in New York. The cast had promise, with Ally Sheedy, Patricia Clarkson (struggling and failing to maintain a German accent) and Radha Mitchell. The photo-magazine setting also caught my interest, but the druggy characters and dark settings dampened my mood. Ally Sheedy as Lucy looked dreadfully gaunt as an alienated star photographer in emotional exile—I hope that was just acting, not real life.

What added an odd angle to High Art was Sheedy's interaction with her mother, an upper-class German-Jew who rails against Sheedy's German girlfriend and drives a Mercedes. The strained mother-daughter relationship and the explicit Jewish angle (including a scene with Shabbat candles in the background) were so at odds with the blank backgrounds of the other characters that I had to wonder what was going on.

Did Holocaust traumas drive Lucy's drugging and withdrawal? What's the backstory on the German girlfriend and the mother's hectoring? Lucy carries the weight of history as well as addiction in her, and that added a fresh element to a romantic threesome movie set in the late Clinton era of New York. High Art is worth watching, but it's no feel-good date movie.

Thinking About Body Images and "Someday Melissa"

I typically scan the New York Times obituary page for lives well lived, but the December 21 edition with the tiny-type paid notices was wrenching with its sketches of too-soon loss. One very long notice was for Suzanne Hart, the advertising executive killed in an elevator accident a week earlier. By contrast, the memorial notice for Melissa Rose Avrin ran only 7 lines, plus a photo. It read,

Dec. 21, 1989-May 6, 2009. Your movie is a reality. It's changing lives around the world in the battle against Eating Disorders. Missing and loving you forever, Mom. www.somedaymelissa.com.

I followed the link and found that "Someday Melissa" is the name of a documentary made by Melissa's mother, Judy Avrin, as a response to Melissa's death at 19 from a heart attack related to her bulimia. It has already accepted at a film festival and screened at medical schools, universities and Jewish community centers. Someday Melissa includes journal entries from Melissa and interviews with family members, friends and medical and mental health professionals.It deserves wide viewing and discussion.

Melissa Avrin's wrenching and fatal bulimia resonates with me as the extreme expression of body-image issues. In my dating days in the 1980s, I met women with bulimia and the memories of their deep distress over appearance and other psychological issues still haunt me. I tried to be as supportive as possible, but I realized the matter was far beyond my influence, other than saying I accepted them for who and what they were. Whatever self-perceptions led them to behave this way had no basis in reality -- they were attractive and fit. But we're not talking about reality with any of this. I couldn't save anybody, and it took years before I realized that.

I touch on body image issues, both men's and women's, in my book, "A Kosher Dating Odyssey." I don't know if Jewish women are more prone to eating disorders than any other ethnic group, but they are perhaps more articulate in acknowledging and addressing them. I look at the film's website and I think of other women and their pain. The film already has had an impact, judging from the hundreds of comments posted on the site's guestbook about viewers' responses to it. I can only hope that Judy Avrin's response to her great loss leads to comfort and support for people who punish themselves when looking in the mirror and not seeing the God-given wonder they truly are.

"Gloomy Sunday"—Finding Compelling Jewish Cinema Via Serendipity

Planning for a four-day weekend, with three days without library access, I went a little wild on Thursday scooping up DVDs. My son's with me so I looked for films through his eyes. Several genres called out to me—a big film noir collection, 13 Assassins in the ever-popular Japanese samurai mode, Gilda with Rita Hayworth, and finally, from the German shelf, Gloomy Sunday. I had never heard of the movie, but the Holocaust themes and Budapest setting suggested this could be worth a look.

We kicked off our holiday film festival with this movie. I highly recommend it to anybody looking for a different take on Holocaust cinema. The Amazon link gives plenty of details about the film, so I'll focus on what made it especially notable for me. First, female lead Erika Marozsán throws out some of the most smoldering looks ever seen in a movie—the term "bedroom eyes" must have been invented for her. She plays a waitress for a Jewish restaurant owner in Budapest, before and during the war. The character and probably the actress aren't Jewish, but she's integral to the plot of a movie that relentlessly moves toward the deportations from Hungary, which happened in 1944. I've already updated my mental list of the sexiest Jewish movies to include Gloomy Sunday on the strength of Marozsán's performance.

The Holocaust aspect is compelling but not nearly as explicit as Schindler's List and The Pianist. I found Gloomy Sunday also interesting also as a Holocaust movie set in Hungary. Other movies that came to mind are the Hungarian-language Fateless and English-language Sunshine are other movies set in Hungary, and they all deal, to differing degrees, with the lives people made after the war ended.

As an extra treat, Gloomy Sunday has a conclusion that makes rewatching earlier parts of the movie a delicious, retributionist pleasure.

Getting This Jewish Show on the Road with . . . Tim Tebow?

This was my first post at a blog connected to my book, "A Kosher Dating Odyssey," at wallach.coffeetownpress.com. Due to a change in the publisher's technology, author blogs will no longer be supported in mid-2018, so I transferred all those Coffeetown Press posts here to Mission2Moscow.

Given that tonight is the first night of Hanukkah, this is an ideal time to start this new blog with thoughts on—Christians and Jews. Sometimes I think I stand at the crossroads between two religious traditions with a 2,000 year history of at best uneasy coexistence and at worst, unidirectional slaughter. A news item last week showed the clash very clearly, and the uproar had a personal angle for me.

The issue involved the column titled "My Tim Tebow Problem" by Rabbi Joshua Hammerman of Stamford, Connecticut's Temple Beth El. The column appeared first online, and then in the print edition of the New York Jewish Week. Rabbi Hammerman expressed his unease about Denver Broncos' QB Tebow, from his missionary parents to his long-time public admissions of his Christian faith. The stunning Broncos OT victory over the Chicago Bears was the straw that broke the rabbi's tolerant back. The column had many unintentionally classic paragraphs, and this captured the tone the best:

If Tebow wins the Super Bowl, against all odds, it will buoy his faithful, and emboldened faithful can do insane things, like burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants.

Rabbi Hammerman continues in that mode and closes with this thought:

Unlike some other blue-staters, I do not fear people of faith. I fear people of certainty. The worldwide struggle going on right now is not between good and evil, but between certainty and doubt. I fear people of certainty. It cuts across denominational lines: Progressive modern Orthodox Jews lie on one side of the divide, joining mainline Christians and moderate Muslims, and those on the other side are also Jews, Christians and Muslims; the people of certainty.

The column certainly caused comment, and the worst thoughts soon vanished from the column and then the column itself was yanked from the Jewish Week website. Fortunately, I bought a copy of the December 16 issue and can enjoy these thoughts in a hard copy, whenever I want. Rabbi Hammerman issued a short apology on his own blog, saying his effort to "make broad points about society and extremism" backfired. The Jewish Week issued its own apology.

I followed the controversy with some horrified fascination. In one connection, I attended services at Beth El when I lived in Stamford; in fact, it was the first synagogue I checked out when I moved there in October 2002. I attended community events where Rabbi Hammerman spoke, and I never had any problems with his comments. So, seeing somebody I sort of know getting pounded in the press made me wince. I felt for him, even if I disagreed with what he wrote.

Rabbi Hammerman's comments also carry a certain twisted validity. He expressed, in a clunky way, what I have heard other Jewish and non-Jewish blue staters say many times. They loathe conservative Christians in terms similar to what appeared in the column. Progressive religious beliefs easily merge into the left wing of the Democratic party, mirroring a process that also happens on the right wing with the GOP. They have little empathy and barely any tolerance for the people of certainty.

As in Rabbi Hammerman's column, the certainty people can be Jewish as much as anybody. I've heard Jews savage the beliefs and lifestyles of Orthodox and, especially, Chasidic Jews. I can imagine them reading the column, now down the memory hole, and nodding, "That's right, he's speaking the truth." He was the perfect progressive on the matter and I would have liked to see the column remain up to stimulate discussion. Apologies notwithstanding, Rabbi Hammerman voiced what he and others think about those icky Tebow types, even Jewish Tebow types.

Tying the discussion in to my upcoming book, "A Kosher Dating Odyssey," I've had first-hand experiences with doubters. I dated one woman who became enraged at the very sight of Orthodox women, whose politics did not align with hers. At one event, she harangued two of them, shouting, "If you don't believe in abortion, then YOU raise the kids people don't want!" I remember thinking, "How can she say that? What if these women lost relatives in the Holocaust, or had infertility problems? She doesn't know anything about them."

Another woman, an immigrant from one of the more repressive corners of Eastern Europe, exhausted me during telephone chats with her anti-American screeds, starting with the idiot leader George Bush and working her way through the political and economic shortcomings that surrounded her. My romantic curiosity, which was considerable, crumbled under the hammerblows of her Euro-skepticism. I'm happy to report that she ultimately returned to the tolerant and thriving Eurozone and is much happier with the culture and politics. The fascist hellhole that is Amerikkka just wasn't her kind of place.

I'll leave it to others to analyze whether those "mainline Christians and moderate Muslims" are really such pals of progressive Jews, and why Hindus and Buddhists were excluded from the discussion. What's the JewBu perspective on coalition building? For now, I hope the controversy leads to reflection on how Jews and Christians get along, and what factors drive Jewish blue staters of faith to lash out at others of faith who don't stick to a very narrow range of politics and lifestyles. I'd like to think doubters and certainers can find common ground. But I'm afraid I'm a person of doubt on this matter.

HurryDate: The Shock of the Real

This post first appeared in JMag, the publication of JDate. Its introduction said: JDate member Van Wallach writes candidly about how he found success using HurryDate, an alternative that brings online dating offline.

Despite my experience with online dating, I still felt nervous heading toward my first speed dating event in New York. Compared to the layers of emotional cushioning communicating online provides—a Jewish speed dating party promised to close the digital distance in real time. Participants have five minutes to go on 10-15 dates. The image came to mind of cake ingredients thrown into a blender; we’d either mix or not.

I thought carefully about presentation. The women would see the 3-D me, not just pictures. Deciding to go upscale, I wore a sports coat, a blue button-down shirt and a confidence-inspiring Jerry Garcia tie. The ensemble said, “I pay attention. You’re worth a guy who dresses nicely for our first encounter.”

I hoped speed dating would work better than other singles events I had attended. I wilt in loud, crowded, alcohol-driven venues where men are challenged to blast into a tight circle of women friends standing together. Typically, the noise, the crowds, and the lack of information about the women inhibit me. I feel adrift and out of my element.

I walked into the bar on Bleeker Street in time for the half-hour of socializing. I scanned the group to check out the women, and the men. The organizers waited a few extra minutes to let stragglers arrive, then began. They explained the mechanics: women stay seated, men rotate every five minutes to the next table for a new date whenever a whistle was blown.

The first date got the speed dating concept off to a very pleasant start. The woman was intelligent, educated and attractive. Information about her children suggested she was probably older than me, but I wasn’t going to let that be a hindrance. I marked her “yes” on my score sheet, which offered only yes-and-no choices. A HurryDate party leaves no room for ambiguity.

I moved through other dates, with each conversation having its own rhythm. What do you do? Where do you live? What do you enjoy doing in your spare time? (I asked that, but nobody asked me). Several times I had to explain the origins of my highly un-Jewish name, Van (and yes, that’s my real name; I’m named after a car, but that’s a story for another time).

I kept my eye on the approaching women as the whistle-signal led to another round of musical chairs. You see, I recognized two of them. One I had met on JDate and dated a few times several years earlier, and another I had written to on JDate and never received a reply. I had contacted her in recent weeks after she changed her picture—I told her I liked the new picture. I never heard back from her.

Two women had the same name and I couldn’t tell from my notes which I was interested in, so I marked both and rolled into a date with the no-reply woman first. We did the usual getting-to-know-all-about-you chatter, then I said, “You know, I wrote to you on JDate and you never responded.” She explained she had had computer problems, and other people had also been concerned when they didn’t hear from her. Our conversation had more of an edge to it, based on a history, albeit a one-sided one. I marked her as a “yes.”

My very next date was the woman I met on JDate in 2004. We went out a few times, then I got involved in something else. She also remembered me, and even mentioned an old screen name of mine. We knew enough to get caught up on work and kid issues, and that felt good. I marked her a “yes,” also.

At home, I logged on and cast my votes. I marked “yes” for four, “no” for the others (I would have marked only three, but two women had the same name I couldn’t tell from my notes which I was interested in, so I marked both). I couldn’t fake enthusiasm for women where I felt no connection. I could tell when I would be interested, on emotional, social and, yes, physical grounds.

A day later, I had three matches, the three I wanted. The evening achieved exactly what I wanted; the confidence-building Jerry Garcia tie worked its magic.

Matthew Polly: Transformation in China

Here's a Princeton Alumni Weekly profile of Matthew Polly '95, a martial arts expert who wrote a book about his experiences. The story says:

Polly’s book, American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China, is a raucous, wry look at his transformation from a “weakling” to a fighting machine. Despite his lonely status as the only English speaker at his academy, Polly persisted in the training and language study so that after a year, he says, “I began to understand the culture. The people let me in.” Published by Gotham Books in February, the book recounts his picaresque adventures as he traveled, clashed with Communist Party functionaries, and switched from kung fu to kickboxing.

In-Q-Tel: Spookily Responsible Investing

Year's end always makes people think of their investment portfolios, and that makes me think about the unique investment strategy of In-Q-Tel, the non-profit venture fund supported by the CIA.

While the In-Q-Tel name is horribly clunky, the corporate mandate is a big winner in any game of Buzzword Bingo:

In-Q-Tel was established in 1999 as an independent, private, not-for-profit company to help the CIA and the greater US Intelligence Community (IC) to identify, acquire, and deploy cutting-edge technologies. In-Q-Tel's open and entrepreneurial venture capital model gives it the agility - lacking within traditional government contracting approaches - to help the IC benefit from the rapid pace of change in information technology and other emerging technology fields.

In-Q-Tel's mission is to deliver leading-edge capabilities to the CIA and the IC by investing in the development of promising technologies. Because early-stage technologies are often unproven, In-Q-Tel takes the calculated risks necessary to develop, prove, and deliver them to the Intelligence Community.

And the company uses an arresting tag line on its highly informative site: "As outside the box as government gets."

I can't evaluate In-Q-Tel's investment strategies or success, but I like to think of this as a War on Terror version of "socially responsible investing." The folks at the Social Investment Forum probably wouldn't be too keen to list In-Q-Tel as an investment vehicle, even if they could. The Social Investment Forum's perspective is:

Your savings and investments can help create a better world! Our new guide gives you hands-on advice and information to help you put your dollars to work to build healthy communities, promote economic equity, and foster a clean environment.

I would like to see In-Q-Tel reframe its value proposition in these terms, as a declaration of "spookily responsible investing." That would have more punch than cutting-edge, leading-edge, bleeding-edge, etc. Why not:

"Your savings and investments can help create a more secure, terror-destroying world! Our new guide gives you phasers-on advice and information to help you put your anti-jihadist dollars to work to build healthy listening devices, promote interrogation equity, and a foster an environment that's more deadly to terrorists and the evil forces that support them."

Doesn't that work better? Where do I send my check?

Wendy Sayvitz: Singing Underground in New York

Here's an alumni profile from the Princeton Alumni Weekly of Wendy Sayvitz '81, who has made a good living as a musician performing (and selling CDs) at Grand Central Terminal.