The invited me to sit next to them as Charming Hostess

Rootless promptly took the stage. The other French couples

around us continued making out, undisturbed.
Cosmopolitan Charming Hostess (www.charminghostess.us) is a
delightfully indescribable enterprise, more an ongoing
Rokhl Kafrissen project than a band. Though the members of the group
haven’t changed much over the years, it is mainly the
The “Sphere of the Endless” brainchild of Jewlia Eisenberg. Eisenberg takes unusual,
provocative texts and sets them to her own eclectic brand

O
der gor, oder gornisht: “Either little, or of Jewish fusion music, mostly exploring different tradi-
nothing,” i.e., “When it rains, it pours.” In tions of a cappella singing. Imagine the love letters of
either language, that’s my life. One recent, Walter Benjamin set to transmogrified doo-wop.
rainy Monday night, I headed over to Joe’s Pub to see On her newest album, Sarajevo Blues, Eisenberg uses
Charming Hostess, a San Francisco-based, avant-garde the translated poems of a contemporary Bosnian poet
Jewish music ensemble led by Jewlia (yes, Jewlia) named Semezdin Mehmedinovic. The resulting piece is
Eisenberg. On the subway ride down to Astor Place, I astonishing in its beauty and its relevance, especially in
sat next to a woman wrapping up a French lesson with the way it humanizes the inhumanity of war. Our war
her student. Her talk of matching adjective endings was in Iraq has been so tightly, criminally managed, leav-
a little too much for me to bear, as I recalled my own ing us shielded from the death that is being doled out in
struggle to memorize French vocabulary words and defense of “our freedom.” What is needed to mobilize
their genders. opposition, even more than comprehensive, popular
Naturally, when I walked into Joe’s Pub, everyone reporting about this war, is empathy. Poetry, at its best,
around me was speaking French (or making out wan- can awaken that empathy in us. Sarajevo Blues moved
tonly, which is as good as speaking me in a way that a week’s worth of New
French). As I searched for a seat, a York Times editorials could not.
woman with curly brown hair smiled When I listen to Jewlia Eisenberg, I
at me. I smiled back. She smiled again. am always struck by how she manages
“Do we know each other?” I asked. To to take disparate texts, marry them to
which she replied, in a thick French odd, haunting music, and express her
accent, “Yes, we were at your bas humanity in an immediate way — and
mitsve.” Not only was everyone sud- make it all work. She sings in many
denly French, but they had been at my Jewish languages —Yiddish, Ladino,
bas mitsve. Odd. I looked at her again, German, English, Hebrew —and refer-
and her young man. “Yes,” she said, ences many musical traditions. Where
“we came wis Itzik Gottesman.” I would normally pounce on such a
Ahh, yes, of course, the Parisians! khutspedik exemplar of cultural appro-
They had crashed my bas miz, de- priation, I could only crane my neck
lightfully so. They were in town for around the amourous French throng and
a month working on (or perhaps in- clap like mad.
venting) a new field of study Ma nishtana . . . What
called klezmography, which Jewlia Eisenberg’s newest album, Sarajevo Blues, makes her promiscuous ap-
combines Jewish music and really is astonishing in its beauty and its relevance. propriation different than
geography. I remembered others? Usually I hate per-
them, oui, bien sur, Chantal formers paying tribute to
and Daniel. Then I smiled, waiting for them to be blown “Our Jewish Heritage” with a song in Yiddish, a song
away by the fact that I had addressed them in French in Ladino and maybe a Hava Nagila encore, doing
and remembered their names. justice to none and making kitsch out of all. Eisenberg,
Eleonore and Samuel (whoops!) smiled again and however, never tries to pass off her pieces as anything

July-August, 2006 45
“authentic,” except authentically her own. Her explora-
tion of Jewish music, themes and texts is always specific,
and motivated, dare I say, by a solid grasp of her own
rootlessness. She sees herself in these disparate forms
because she appreciates the disparate elements in her-
self. As she wrote in her liner notes for Sarajevo Blues:
“As described by Sem [the Bosnian poet], Sarajevo
sounds very cool; a pluralistic place [that] included
not just the South Slavic ethnic and language groups,
but also Sufis, Sephardic Jews and Franciscans. For
many years, Sarajevo successfully rejected the limits
of nationalism and militarism, and instead embraced
connectedness.”
She goes on to observe that out of this connectedness
came a wartime, urban culture of magazines, poetry and
films that served not merely to inform the outside world
about what was going on, but to nourish the people of
Sarajevo by reaffirming their community and connected-
ness in the face of nationalism.
The tension between nationalism and connectedness
can also be expressed as the tension between what Shi-
mon Rawidowicz (1897-1957) called the “spheres of
the end and the endless.” The sphere of the end, as he
described it, is the world of the immediate: of results,
solutions and exclusions. The sphere of the endless is
the world of the spirit: of the expansion of possibilities,
of learning and creativity.
Nationalism belongs to the sphere of the end, and by
its nature excludes — usually violently — other possi-
bilities of connection to others. As Rawidowicz (author
of Israel, the Ever-Dying People and Other Essays and a
long-time philosopher at Brandeis University) explained
it, the meaning of Jewish redemption changed from the
time of the Prophets to the time of the Second Temple’s
destruction, after which
the heavy yoke of galut [exile] made the dream of
redemption on the one hand more urgent and burning
than in the days of the Prophets, and on the other,
more radical, theoretical and utopian. . . . For various
social and political reasons, the vision of redemption
became more national than before, narrower and more
restricted, but also more concrete and bloodier, because
redemption [goel], by its very nature, is blood-drenched.
The root gimel-aleph-lamed is related to blood . . . Re-
demption, then, is initially linked with blood, the blood
of the individual, of the family, and of the tribe. Later, an
abstract, spiritual meaning developed from the word or
concept goel: geulah, redemption as national liberation,
redemption of the people. But ultimately, redemption is
46
bloody, it costs blood.
Nationalism comes at a great price. Despite this
price, however, the “sphere of the end,” as Rawidowicz
points out, is seductive to all peoples, and especially
to Jews. It’s not surprising that with the suffering of
millennia upon us, Jews long for an end, either through
self-redemption or self-annihilation (assimilation). But
Rawidowicz warns against blind faith in the redemptive
power of force: “Man does not live by force alone, and
certainly not a nation. Isaiah’s prophecy that ‘Zion shall
be redeemed by justice’ was not just a catch phrase . . .
Justice is, on a deeper level, one of the symbols of the
endless, the infinite.”
Two weeks after being charmed by Charming Hostess
and their Francophile audience, I stood on the sidelines
of the Salute to Israel Day parade and thought about the
collision of Rawidowicz’s spheres in Jewish life. Also
on the sidelines were anti-occupation protesters (and a
few anti-anti-occupation protesters) and the laughable
Neturei Karta waving their Palestinian flags. Suddenly
I was seized with the desire to lead my own Salute to
Golus Day parade all the way back up to Washington
Heights — away from the sphere of flag-waving same-
ness to the sphere of the endless in my surprisingly
diverse Jewish neighborhood.
Judaism and the Jewish people are often criticized
for tribalism, and for focussing on law over spirit. Yet
Jews have always roamed widely, both geographically
and spiritually-intellectually. One of the keys to our
survival has been our unique status as an international
nation, a scattered people that embraced many kinds of
Jewishness, many languages, many nationalities, many
traditions. And the truth is that we still do. But no one’s
going to organize a parade to celebrate that.
“The people of the endless in its true depth,” wrote
Rawidowicz, “are essentially the backbone of the Jew-
ish people . . . they are often the great hidden ones of the
generation who protect the house of Israel from external
and internal fires. They are the personification of stiff-
neckedness; in them, it reaches its fullest and highest
expression; even if they are not the wings of Israel, they
are its head and its heart, its hands and its feet.”
Jewlia Eisenberg’s creative, integrative, connected
music was, for me, a small taste of the endless that
sustains us. And in these times, with the demands of
multiple nationalisms upon us, we need her, and people
like her, more than ever.
Jewish Currents