Jerusalem jigsaw

>> Joel Schalit’s Jerusalem Calling is a complex
puzzle with a few pieces missing

by JULIET WATERS

There are things I want to know after reading Joel Schalit’s collection of ruminative personal/
political essays, Jerusalem Calling: A Homeless Conscience in a Post-Everything World.

Like the circumstances of his mother’s premature death. Schalit remembers his father sprinkling his mother’s ashes from a military helicopter over Masada, an ancient fortress where Jewish rebels once slit the throats of their wives and children, rather than see them captured. Or the facts of his brother’s death in Miami. They may not add or detract from the irony that he died young in “the anti-Jerusalem, the place that old New York Jews go to die.” But not having a fuller picture is distracting.

Mostly though, I’d love to know what his sister, Naomi, was thinking when she enrolled Joel in an Episcopal boarding school in Portland, Oregon when he was 15. This is not the natural environment for a Jewish teenager with an Israeli pedigree so impressive he received the same birthday present from assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jerusalem’s former mayor, Teddy Kollek—model F-4 Phantom jets.

Reading Schalit is like being invited to watch someone put together a fascinating, complex puzzle only to find that a few pieces are being deliberately locked away. This is often the problem when Marxists write memoirs. They are not usually comfortable with the act of public introspection, which is why it’s not always a bad idea for them to do some time in prison. As a writer, Schalit may owe more to that Oregon Episcopal school, which seems to be the closest he’s ever come to internment, than he lets on.

At any rate, this experience is responsible for his life-long obsession with Christian fundamentalism. It inspired his band/spoken word act, the Christal Methodists, and an impressively argued essay on the place of fundamentalism in the U.S. cultural and political landscape, “America the Enchanted.”

Schalit, editor of the zine Punk Planet, and co-director of the journal Bad Subjects, makes a strong case that American progressives are not paying sufficient attention to the risks of the rising Christian right-wing. But even if there were a fundamentalist conspiracy, “it is of utmost importance that those involved in the struggles against religious conservatism grasp the whole picture and avoid indulging in the snotty hyperbole that many educated radicals tend to profer, speaking about religious people as though they were backwards or stupid.
Schalit’s perspective is both a vigilant and thoughtful attempt at grasping this “whole picture.” Which makes it all the more irritating when he occasionally doesn’t provide it himself. But, for the most part, Schalit successfully grapples with a number of subjects, drawing from his personal experience, his travels and his post-graduate training in critical theory. He touches on the true motivations of the U.S. involvement in Bosnia (to keep Iran out); the disheartening similarities between the exploitative labour practices in both the mainstream and the alternative culture industry; the fetishization of violence and war toys in Israel; and the future possibilities for the left.

“So what am I suggesting. That leftists should once again strike the revolutionary pose of Che Guevara? That they should proudly declare themselves to be communists in spite of everything that word now implies? Or that leftists should, rather, learn from right-wing political demagogues how to advance radical political goals from within a superficially liberal framework? Individually, none of these measures seems particularly attractive. Taken together, however, they might add up to something. But the real answer, I think, is to pay closer attention to the role of history in the present, gaining awareness of our conditioning as we navigate the ironies of contemporary existence.”

At least with this suggestion, nothing important seems to be left out. :

Jerusalem Calling by Joel Schalit, Akashic Press, pb, 222pp, $17.95