Banned books, rogue rappers, and a ham sandwich on lard bread
Phoebe Maltz Bovy on the trending topics of the year 5783
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S ince starting at The CJN in September of last year, I’ve been covering the culture from a Jewish lens, in my column and on the Bonjour Chai podcast. When I sat down to think of what this past year will be remembered for, here’s a smattering of what I came up with. Whither the secular Jew? This year saw a crisis in Israel over the role of Ortho- doxy in the state. Demographically, Haredi Jews have a certain undeniable advantage. This does not stop the likes of billionaire philanthropist Michael Steinhardt—co- founder of Taglit-Birthright Israel—from asking less-ob- servant Jews to please have more babies. Nor does it prevent the more liberal denominations from welcoming the children of intermarriage, thereby adding to the ranks of, if not fully secular Jews, non-Orthodox ones, Jews who come from a wide range of cultural backgrounds. In any event, the days of cultural Jewishness as bagels and Woody Allen movies are—for a variety of reasons—
long gone. North American Jews battled it out amongst ourselves over Jewish authenticity and belonging. Right- wing American commentator Ben Shapiro called Vermont senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders “approximately as Jewish as a ham sandwich topped with shrimp on lard bread.” Is Sanders less of a Jew than the more observant and more pro-Israel (though Sanders is not anti-Israel) Shapiro? Or, as some would contend, is it in fact Sanders who exudes Jewish authenticity from every Brooklyn-accented pore, and Shapiro, darling of the small-c conservatives, who fails to measure up? We at The CJN had our own lively debates in this area. On Bonjour Chai we brought in legendary American Jew- ish journalist and podcaster Mark Oppenheimer, former- ly of Tablet and its Unorthodox podcast, to discuss his argument that the secular-but-curious should give Jewish practice a chance. Indeed, with our weekly podcasts, Avi Finegold and I bring secular-observant dialogue into the
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