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Rabbi, Run

Rabbi, Run from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

All credit to the highly capable Ari Daniel Shapiro, for whose production work I am grateful.

Uganda Part 2

The chronicles of Rabbi Gershom Sizomu continue on Tablet. An excerpt from part 2, which looks more closely at the religious inheritance the Abayudaya live with:

What is it to be Jewish? This was at least one of the questions that I wanted the Abayudaya to answer, even during the distraction of Sizomu’s all-consuming campaign for parliament. It’s the question that had brought thousands of visitors before me—people like Meyer and Chamovitz—to this hilly part of East Africa, if not to hear an answer in words then at least to confront their own Jewish identity with a different idea of the same thing. The Abayudaya, having clearly been asked this question again and again, have developed certain straightforward answers that I heard from a number of congregants of all generations. Sizomu’s mother, Devora, a 74-year-old who still lives in Nangolo village on the same land where she gave birth to Sizomu, told me that only God can answer the question of what it means to be Jewish, and that keeping Shabbat is the most important part of the practice. Solomon Magoma, 83, ailing, and lying on a straw mat in a mud hut behind his family’s one-room house, told me that “identifying as that thing, Jewish,” was foremost, and that following the Ten Commandments gave him strength. His grandson, Moshe Sebagabo, took me to see the Namanyonyi syn-a-go-gee, and as we toured the cement-floored interior and opened the ark, with its decorated sheet-metal box, he spoke to me of having “too much religious feeling,” of understanding the essence of his faith as “being an example to others.”

How far does this example extend? To non-Jewish neighbors? To countries? To all of God’s creation? To be an example to others supposes that you are somehow related to them. This Kakungulu—the colonial chieftain and founder of the Abayudaya—understood well. Missionary presence and patriarchal tribalism had taught the people of Uganda that religion not only makes a universal claim on you but also connects you to people beyond the village.

Read the rest here.

Uganda

Gershom Sizomu is the charismatic rabbi of the Abayudaya, who live outside Mbale, Uganda. Tablet publishes the first of a two-part long piece on the community, its founding, its survival under Amin, and its prospects for becoming part of global Judaism.

Election
The Abayudaya of Uganda have been Jewish since a colonial-era chieftain decided to follow the five books of Moses. A century later, a descendant of those African Jews became a rabbi and ran for parliament. Part 1 of 2.

It is election time in Uganda, and the boxy plastic television set in my room in the provincial city of Mbale, four hours east of Kampala, is humming with ads, nearly all of them for Yoweri Museveni, the president for the past 24 years. Museveni is up for another five-year term in office, and his ads mimic the slow-mo camerawork of a Ken Burns documentary—pans and zooms of images of the besuited leader flipping the switch at power plants and pumping wells and unlocking medicine cabinets, all backed by Louis Armstrong’s version of “What a Wonderful World.” His signature flourish is a light khaki boonie hat with a drawstring and a wide brim, which gives his shiny oval head the aspect of a haloed icon. He’s been telling his supporters at campaign rallies across the country to “vote the old man with the hat.” The country and its capital have been plastered with yellow posters of his beatific smile and watchful, unblinking eyes.

What a wonderful world indeed! More than half of Uganda’s 34 million people have known no other leader. The other half knew Idi Amin. A local newspaper declares, straight-faced, that “Spirits predict 87 percent victory” for Museveni’s National Resistance Movement. His TV ad closes on the slogan “Why change?”

The mototaxi boda boys sitting under a frangipani tree on a median in Mbale had just finished something resembling a conference on the pitcher’s mound about the location of the people I had come to see: a small community of Ugandan Jews who live in the hills outside Mbale and who call themselves the Abayudaya. Some of the boys pointed me one way, some in the opposite direction. Then I placed my palm on my head to make the universal sign for Jew. “Oh!” said a boda in a striped Oxford shirt that—like most of Uganda’s clothes—used to belong to an American. “People of the very small hats!” Off we went on his Chinese-made motorcycle down the last of the town’s tarmac, past the municipal town council, and onto red dusty roads rising through coffee and plantain patches, in search of the Abayudaya and their leader, a man who in what can be seen as a late fulfillment of one early version of the Zionist dream, is the first native African-born rabbi to run for parliament in Uganda.

Read the rest of part 1 here. Tune in tomorrow for part 2.

Hailuogou

In the Boston Review, a dispatch from winter.

Zigzag Ice Dragon

Porters in ratty green uniforms are standing by their bamboo-and-metal sedans, calling out to the busloads of Chinese tourists. The tourists are huddled in groups on the frozen parking lot, strapping mini crampons onto all sorts of inappropriate footwear, or zipping up their rented snow boots. It’s February, and the New Year holiday has given way to a period of frantic mass travel that has what seems like all of China on the move.

Hailuogou National Glacier Forest Park is shrouded in a cold whiteout. My brother and I, traveling in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, have paid a couple hundred yuan for matching entrance and transport tickets, which double as postcards. We churn past three thermal-bath resorts, tiered by price and comfort. The rolling green-tea fields of Sichuan province are miles downriver, on the other side of massive tunnel and hydroelectric projects reshaping Tibet’s eastern slope.

Read the rest at Boston Review

From the Mountaintop

My Tablet review of the renovation of the Israel Museum is up:

James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum since 1997 and overseer of its recent $100-million renovation, repeated several times over the course of a two-day press junket in Jerusalem last month that his institution offers nothing short of “an intuitive experience of 1 million years of material culture.” If this description sounds a little blissed out, it is also entirely in keeping with the museum’s hilltop location, which puts the museum on par with the Knesset and the Supreme Court. The site on which the Israel Museum stands was chosen in the 1960s in accordance with former Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek’s Greco-Roman vision of a capital crowned by the legislative, judicial, and cultural branches of national identity. Snyder’s “renewal” of the museum seeks to recast Kollek’s classical approach in even more exalted and transcendent terms. One of the museum’s two new site-specific commissions, Anish Kapoor’s 16-foot “Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem,” appears to lift the inverted museum and surrounding dry hills into the blue sky in a way that invites the viewer to experience the site as a universal state of mind rather than as an institution of the state. Like the sculpture, the renovations are beautiful. But what about the people they now reflect?

Read the rest here.

A Question of Faith

photo  © Amber Terranova

My story out today in Tablet comes from Medellin, Colombia, where I spent time with a group of Jewish converts who trace their heritage to the Marranos of the Spanish Inquisition. It's a story with a little of everything: deep-fried pork rinds, conspiracies, kidnapping, and guerrilla.

The article is here. The accompanying slideshow is here.

Embers

The Times publishes my Jewspotting effort from Kaifeng, China today. This is a story that, for being in Travel, left a lot of topics on the cutting-room floor: identity, migration, loss and the motivations behind religion. Themes to come back to.

China's Ancient Jewish Enclave

THROUGH a locked door in the coal-darkened boiler room of No. 1 Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Kaifeng, there’s a well lined with Ming Dynasty bricks. It’s just a few yards deep and still holds water. Guo Yan, 29, an eager, bespectacled native of this Chinese city on the flood plains of the Yellow River about 600 miles south of Beijing, led me to it one recent Friday afternoon, past the doormen accustomed to her visits.

The well is all that’s left of the Temple of Purity and Truth, a synagogue that once stood on the site. The heritage it represents brings a trickle of travelers to see one of the more unusual aspects of this country: China, too, had its Jews.

Read the rest here.

Sometimes, the Onion is just too good

Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere

or maybe the old news giants are just too easy of a target. If that were true, though, how could you account for the brilliance of this?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
CNN Leaves It There
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

The flower of Sino-Israeli friendship is blooming

A first of several China dispatches. This one, in Tablet, looks at Sino-Israeli relations, a strange little whale-and-pilot dance.

Kosher Chinese
At this spring’s World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, Israel will show off its burgeoning bilateral relationship with the host country

The beit knesset—the meeting place—is Haya’s Mediterranean Cuisine, an Israeli restaurant in Shanghai’s Zhuanqiao district. Forty-odd Shanghai-based businessmen and women, members of the the Israeli Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, are smoking like Chinese and drinking espresso like natives of Tel Aviv. Chocolates, made by an Israeli living in Luxemburg, in town for China’s first Salon du Chocolat, are said to be on their way. Designer glasses and shaved heads surround the tables.

Jackie Eldan, Israel’s consul general in Shanghai, in a grey suit and looking tired with a five o’clock shadow, is standing in front of a rendering, projected on a wall, of Haim Dotan Architects’ Israel Pavilion for Shanghai’s World Expo 2010, less than 100 days from opening. He is telling the group, a bit mischievously and in English, that the modernist pavilion—it looks a bit like a high-backed snail followed by a slime trail—exceeds the strict height limitations by four meters, making it the second-tallest national building on the grounds.

“Our placement is good,” Eldan says. “Right next to the Chinese Pavilion,” which looks like a massive inverted pyramid, colored in an auspicious shade of red, the color of prosperity. “But we still look like a grain of rice that fell out of that big bowl.”

Read the rest here.

In China

I'm in China, reporting three stories, through early March. It's all here on Find China, http://chinable.org, so why don't you click it already? Come on back to OPP once that trip is over.

Io Parlo Italiano

As I prepare for an upcoming trip to China, the NYTimes Cocuy story has made the rounds, including a melodious translation into Italian:

I ramponi scricchiolano sulla neve. Grossi ghiaccioli color acquamarina sembrano pendere dalle bocche di un profondo crepaccio. Più in basso, le nuvole coprono il bacino del fiume Orinoco come una morbida coperta. Il paesaggio si distende lungo decine e decine di vette ricoperte di neve e profondi circhi glaciali. I laghi morenici risplendono nella luce tersa...

Va bene!

In the spirit, why not

Bikes in Disgrace

Los Angeles Times, 1895. Stuff that gets churned up in research. Read the rest here. 

Monkey do.

I've gone twitter. I am a monkey. You should follow me.




You'll learn about new stuff in media, neuroscience, colombiannesshood and sundry gems from my days mining info, reporting and writing. If blogs are a writer's slagheap, then twitter is a 47th-street diamond store: all glitter, no coal.



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Colombianidad II

Thanks to Felipe, again.

Marcos's Cocuy photos on PDN's Photo of the Day

Marcos's work in the Cocuy is featured on PDN's Photo of the Day. Take a look.

El Cocuy in the Times

On the Ritak U'Wa Blanco. photo: Marcos Roda

I report from El Cocuy National Park in this week's travel section.

Above the Clouds in a Secret Colombia

AS crampons crunched ice, our guide, Rubará, raised his traditional woven sisal-thread handbag by his face and asked me to snap a photo. We were climbing above 17,000 feet, just shy of the summit of the Ritacuba Blanco, a glaciated peak shaped like a soft-serve ice cream cone, at El Cocuy National Park in Colombia. Aquamarine-hued icicles hung from the maw of a crevasse and, far below, clouds blanketed the Orinoco Basin.

The landscape stretched across dozens of ice-capped peaks and deep cirque valleys. Moraine lakes, formed by the natural erosion from glaciers’ unhurried flow and retreat, shimmered in mineral hues. Nearly 30 miles away, we could just make out the telltale church spire of the town of Soatá. Save for a photographer friend and one other guide on the ice field, no other people were in view. The February day was bright. I’d finally caught my breath.

Read on here. And please check out Dennis Drenner's excellent photos in the slide show as well.


More photos, from Marcos Roda and myself, with the voice of Miguel Herrera; 2:08 in all:


Thanks to mucholoquito for creative commons use of his music, off Jamendo.
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Park Street Remembered

Window views, Park Street, June, 2009

Some ideas about home, explored in this video of the house where I grew up, in Charlottesville. A rough cut; low res; just playing around. Photos mine, from June, 2009.

Or, pay a visit of your own:

View Larger Map

ktbnik

I've taken on a pro bono role over at Killing the Buddha, as contributing editor [whom, as Patrick Symmes once pointed out to me, neither contributes nor edits]. I'll be trying to bring audio and multimedia to the site, even though in the area I complete the three "unders-": under-qualified, under-achieving and under-paid. I'm hoping to convince this capable ITP grad to share some expertise. At any rate, stay tuned over there.