Updated website

Cleaner, neater, calmer, more professional; fitter, happier, more collected: the new fishbane.com.







Many thanks to Maria Mendez for the code.

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.