This post was first published as “Why is Rachel Weisz Wearing a Cross Pendant?” on The Shmooze blog of the Forward.
We’ve noted the recent trend of non-Jewish celebrities and public figures wearing Jewish jewelry. Remember Sarah Palin’s big Magen David pendant and Elijah Wood’s ring inscribed with a quote from Pirkei Avot? Now the Shmooze wonders why Jewish actress Rachel Weisz has started the reverse trend by wearing a cross — and one that costs $6,400.
Weisz, whose full name is Rachel Hannah Weisz and who refused to change her identifiably Jewish name for the sake of her career, can be seen in the Wall Street Journal’s latest glossy fashion supplement modeling menswear-inspired ensembles. The attractive actress looks great in all those tailored pants and jackets, including one outfit comprised of a jacket by Michael Kors, a The Row t-shirt from Barneys and trousers by Pringle of Scotland. The text with that photo also mentions that her bra (noticeable through the sheer t-shirt) is by Dolce & Gabbana and her pendant (that would be the aforementioned cross) is by De Beers.
On March 23, Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic commented on the absurdity of Reuters’ putting “terrorist attack” in quotes in a report on the bombing that day at a bus stop in Jerusalem that killed one woman and wounded 50 people. He quoted Reuters as publishing, “Police said it was a ‘terrorist attack’ — Israel’s term for a Palestinian strike.”
There’s no need for me to quote Goldberg’s justified rant here, since you have probably already read it on Facebook, Twitter or the like (it was recommended on Facebook alone 5000 times so far). But on the off chance that you haven’t, click here to read it.
I’m glad Goldberg spoke out, but the shock factor seems a bit overblown given that this is merely yet another “Journey to Reuterville,” as James Taranto, editor of OpinionJournal.com (the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal) has put it. He wrote a number of years ago,
Far more dangerous than the hard anti-Americanism of the far left (and some elements of the far right) is the moral relativism that prevails among Western liberal elites, especially in journalism. Exhibit A is Reuters. As we noted on Sept. 24, 2001:
Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters, the British wire service, has ordered his scribes not to use the word terror to refer to the Sept. 11 atrocity. . . . “We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist,” Jukes writes in an internal memo. “To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack.”
Reuters is the most self-righteous about it, but many other news organizations also use terms like militants, commandos, guerrillas and even dissidents to refer to terrorists–even though in some cases these terms are not only overly solicitous to the enemy but factually inaccurate (a guerrilla attack, for instance, has a military target, while a terrorist attack targets civilians).
Then less than a month later Canadian Broadcasting Company did an extensive write-up on the usage of the terms “terrorist” and “terrorism” by news agencies and the U.N. In this summary, it reported that following 9/11,
…Reuters, which lost six of its own employees in the attacks, issued an internal memo reminding staff of a long-standing policy: “We do not use terms like ‘terrorist’ and ‘freedom fighter’ unless they are in a direct quote or are otherwise attributable to a third party. We do not characterize the subjects of news stories but instead report their actions, identity and background so that readers can make their own decisions based on the facts.”
In 2002 the CBC made like Reuters and instructed its journalists not to use the terms “terrorism” or “terrorist” other than in this way, ie. only in quotation marks in attribution to a source.
Yeah, yeah, I understand the push for impartiality on the part of reporters and journalists. But sometimes you just need to use some common sense and have some integrity. The CBC piece refers analogously to the fact that “in 1964 U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart admitted it might be impossible to ‘intelligibly’ define obscenity, but quickly added ‘I know it when I see it.'” I think this obtains in the case of terrorism, as well. You definitely know it when you see it.
When I first read quickly through this section of the article on the CBC website, I mistakenly thought this statement was attributed to Jon Stewart. I went back and realized that I had the wrong Stewart in mind. Or did I? It was actually a logical slip. I think many would agree that the The Daily Show often has a better grasp of the events of the day than does any other (news) source, especially Reuters.
Special thanks to my source who did the research for this post.
It was my reading in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal that President Obama checked the “black” box on his census form, but that the younger Tiger Woods chooses not to go for single-race classifications (he refers to himself as “Cablinasian” – Caucasian-black-Indian-Asian), that reminded me of a one-day symposium on “The Changing Face of the Jewish Family” I attended ten years ago in New York. It was really the first time that I had ever gathered with fellow Jewish community professionals to consider the impact of the growing numbers of non-traditional Jews in our midst. When I say “non-traditional,” I am not referring to religious practice, but rather Jews who were not until then traditionally found in the North American Jewish community: openly gay people, single parents by choice, interfaith couples with no intention of one partner converting, and non-white Jews. And for those among us professionals who work in education, the focus was on how the children of these members of the community could best be served by our institutions and organizations.
I was long aware that not all Jews are Ashkenazi, from Central and Eastern European descent. My years in Israel had taught me that Jews come in all different shapes, sizes, and skin tones, and that they speak many different languages and live life according to a wide variety of customs and cultural practices. But as far as I understood, Jews – be they Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrachi or even Ethiopian (as I learned Jews could be when Operation Moses took place in the mid 1980’s) – were first and foremost (if not exclusively) Jews as far as their ethnic and cultural identities were concerned.
Sure, you could be a Russian Jew, a Peruvian Jew, an Indian Jew, a Chinese Jew, or a Syrian Jew. But the “Russian,” or “Indian” was an adjective, a descriptor of your nationality or citizenship. The noun, your essence, was “Jew.” This, of course, was a result of the historical reality for Jews over many centuries of being outsiders, of being a people that, despite living all over the Diaspora and interacting to various degrees with the other inhabitants of the countries in which they lived, was always a nation apart. Things did change with the arrival of Emancipation and the modern era, but even up until very recently, Jews tended to in-marry, preserve Jewish ethnic solidarity, and continue to self-identify culturally primarily as Jews.
It’s sort of weird to be in my early 40’s (which we all know are the new 20’s) and be saying, “That was then, but this is now.” But the reality is that my generation is on “kav hatefer” (Hebrew for “the seam line”) between a world in which almost all Jews were “just Jews” and the one today in which many Jews are “Jews and something else.” Little girls from China adopted by American Jewish families are Chinese Jews. But they are Chinese in the cultural sense, not the national one. The same principle applies for the Asian-Jewish children of marriages between one ethnically Jewish parent and one parent of Asian background. African-American Jews enter the Jewish community through bi-racial marriages, adoption or religious choice, and most choose to maintain their African-American culture and ethnic/racial identity to some degree.
The face of Judaism is changing as more Jews of color become part of the community, and young Jews (whether they are of color, or not) insist that cultural identity is not about differentiating yourself from others, but rather about maintaining your Jewish essence while simultaneously reaching out to – and even equally identifying with – other cultures. For young Jews, being Jewish is becoming less and less about making “or” choices, but rather “and” ones.
I have come to realize this even more since moving to Northern California almost five years ago. The West Coast is almost always on the vanguard of social change, and the shifts in the Jewish community I have described above are no exception. San Francisco is fittingly the home of B’chol Lashon(In Every Tongue), an organization advocating for the growth and diversity of the Jewish People, recognizing the impact of intermarriage, adoption and conversion on the contemporary Jewish community. Although not the only organization working in this arena, it is leading the field, and it is operating on the global stage.
One of B’chol Lashon’s strengths is that it gives voice – literally as well as figuratively – to Jews of color. One way it does this is by producing videos and podcasts. Another is by making sure the public knows about relevant resources produced by others. The following are trailers for three new documentary films (one already released and the other two in post-production) I learned about from B’chol Lashon‘s website:
We’ve noted the recent trend of non-Jewish celebrities and public figures wearing Jewish jewelry. Remember Sarah Palin’s big Magen David pendant and Elijah Wood’s ring inscribed with a quote from Pirkei Avot? Now the Shmooze wonders why Jewish actress Rachel Weisz has started the reverse trend by wearing a cross — and one that costs $6,400.
Truth, Praise and Help 