A (6:52)
There is truth to that. You speak the truth. That's very deep, what you just said, and yes, and true. Now, as for me, my name is Noah Ephraim and I do not mean to boast, but I got an Airbnb this past Shabbat for us to go away and celebrate Susan's birthday. And when I got home, I wrote my very enthusiastic review of the yurt we stayed in. It was it is an excellent yurt. And I pressed upload. And then I found myself shockingly impatient to get back the review that Ruti, the owner of the yurt, wrote about us. You know how it works. The quote unquote host and the quote unquote visitor each write a review of the other and they send it in. But the Airbnb people only publish them when both sides have written so that the one doesn't influence the other. And I wrote mine that night as soon as we got home, and while I returned the rental car and then walked the dog, I kept refreshing the app to see if Ruti had sent her review in Of Us. And it was like that time in set at the Hebrew Academy when Jay Roden passed a note to Anne Saxer saying, Noah likes you. Or I think it might have said Noah likes like you, do you like or like like Noah? And it had two check boxes underneath, one yes and one no. And I watched as the note went from hand to hand and I watched as Anne thought about it and took a pen out of her desk and I watched until the note came back hand over hand and it was just like that. But this time it was Ruti, my host at the Green Yurt. And when I woke up the next day and checked first thing, I kept refreshing and refreshing to see, well, does Ruthie like me? Which box did she check? And please believe me when I say that I am not bragging. God knows that that is not how my folks raised me. But I think that I've retained a certain youthfulness to me that many of my friends seem to have lost when they stopped being cripplingly insecure. Also, I read at past a ninth grade level, that's true. I should add that joining us for our second discussion and hopefully will persuade him to stay on and share a what a country will be one of my oldest and dearest friends, Professor Gordon Leifer, who I will introduce more fully when he is here to be introduced. Today we got two topics of such grave importance that we worried about how we would ever get a security clearance for this podcast episode. But first, we have this matter in memoriam. Last Friday, hundreds of people came to Beita' Almin Minuchot Olam, the Eternal Rest Cemetery in Netanyah, a cooperative cemetery with an ideology, the ideology being that it is not run by rabbis and that it is dedicated to enabling every human being to bid farewell to loved ones in the manner he chooses and believes, exercising their right to a dignified and respectful burial. The people came to laid arrest Yair Garbuz, an artist, writer, teacher, political activist of sorts and public intellectual who himself had no love for rabbis. Many of the people who came are famous, some of them extravagantly so, like former president Ruvi Rivlin, actor Rivka Mikhaili, writer Chaim Be', Er, playwright Ephraim Tzidon, illustrator Dani Kerman, comedian Shlomo Nizan, singer Nurit Galron, all of them very accomplished, all of them in their 70s or 80s or 90s, all people who starting 50 years ago in the 1970s you would see at the lefty demonstrations in Tel Aviv, Peace Now, Yeshvul, what have you you would clock them either just a bit over from you in the crowd, or often enough you would see them on the stage speaking to the crowd. Yair Garbuz himself came from an accomplished family, tightly bound in the warp and woof of Israel's leftist establishment. His older brother, Aharon Harel, was a Labor MK for most of the 1980s, and he served as the head of the Israel Broadcast Authority and high up in the Histadroot labor union. His son and Yair Garbus nephew, Asaf Harel, was, until not that long ago, deputy mayor of Tel Aviv and Yair Garbuz's younger brother, Alon Garbuz was head of Tel Aviv's cinematheque for 40 years, building the place into what it is today, becoming, as he did, a legendary character in the cities and the country's cultural establishment. Now people of this same ilk, celebrities and mandarins, movers and shakers, were here, hundreds of them, under the great awning at the entrance to the green lawns of the cemetery, consoling one another. Chaim Be' er read passages from essays Yair Garbuz wrote about his life in art. Dani Kerman said, quote, they once asked Yair, why aren't you like everyone else? And Yair answered, I want to be like everyone else, but everyone else refuses to change. End quote. Margalit Garbuz, who was married to Yair Garbus for 60 years and whom, as Dani Karman said, was the only person Yair Garbuz truly revered, Beard told this story. Today is Friday, I taught Yair to bring me flowers. Every Friday he would go into the store. Sometimes he would take a ready made bouquet, but sometimes he would pick each flower from the buckets in the store and he would make a bouquet out of them. The saleswoman, he told me, said to him, but they do not go together. So he said to her, so they will learn to go together. Yair Garbuz had his first Solo Gallery show 59 years ago, in 1967 at the Masada Gallery at Diesenghaf, 164, two floors over the old Masada Bookstore. Since then he has made thousands of works of art shown in 52 solo shows in galleries and museums around the country and around the world. And there were group shows too, of course, and he taught art at the Art Teachers Seminary at Bateborough College and at the Avni Institute for Art in Tel Aviv, where Yair Garbuz did his own training, and he was the editor of the best satire publication the country ever had the Varacher. He won Israel's top journalism prize for that. And he was the host of a classic TV satire show, Ein im Mila Daber There is no One to Talk with, it was called. And he wrote nine books of essays and he won prize after prize and got countless honors. He did all this and still what he is most known for and what he will surely be remembered for, there's no question about that, are 8 minutes and 17 seconds. On the evening of March 7, 2015, at a demonstration at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, 10 days before an angrily contested election, polls showed to be a dead heat, during which 8 minutes and 17 seconds, Yair Garbuz stood in front of more than 100,000 left leaning voters and said this. Ashinui. Good evening. Good evening to all who long for a change. They told us and want us to believe that the despicable man who murdered the Prime Minister came from a tiny fringe of delusional people. They told us he had been influenced by out of touch rabbis and that he belonged to the lunatic fringe. They told us that the yellow shirted and black emblemed followers of Kahane was right. Those shouting Death to Arabs are only a fringe, merely a tiny fringe. The wicked perpetrators of price tag attacks are surely just a fringe too. A mere handful. The Temple Mount faithful, the would be rebuilders of the Temple, the entire inciters of hatred, just a fringe. Violence, they said, was only a marginal phenomenon. Again and again they repeated and drilled into us that the racists who threatened and cursed us do not represent Israeli society at all. They are only a fringe. And then they had the gall to tell us that the thieves and bribe takers are also only a fringe. The corrupt and the swinish hedonists, no more than a fringe. The destroyers of democracy. A fringe. Those who think democracy means the tyranny of the majority, a fringe. The kissers of amulets, the idol worshipers, those who bow and prostrate themselves at the graves of holy men, merely a fringe. Even the sexual harassers and rapists are a fringe. And the corrupt policemen and liars who lie, they told us, are not representative of the whole. But if all of these are only a fringe, then how is it that the fringe rules over us? How is it that without anyone noticing and without anyone stopping it, the fringe has become a majority? How did it happen that being so destructive a fringe turned out to be so contagious? How is it that the fringe became so fat, so aggressive, so crude? And how is it, digging beneath us, that Most dangerous of tunnels, the Tunnel of Ignorance. How is it that by their hands they're snakes beneath us? The Tunnel of Hate. I went to Shuka Carmel, the Carmel market, two days after Yair Garbuz's speech, just to buy stuff we needed. And I was confused to find there and maybe every other basta or stand. There was a picture of Yair Garbuz pinned up. I asked one of the guys I buy from, he remembers me because of my accent and he's friendly to me, poking fun in a warm way. I said, I know you enough to know that you had to. I hate what Garbuz said on Moze Shabbat. Why do you have his picture hanging? And he said, my parents came here from Morocco with nothing and they lived in a tin hut in a transit camp for seven years and no one official ever helped them. All they got from the clerks and self important party hacks who came was condescension. And everything they got, they got on their own or because of their friends and family. Nothing ever came from the government or from your people, the Ashkenazim. And they built a life for themselves and for their kids. And I owe all that I am to them. And this picture of Garbus, I put it here to remind me of what they went through, of every clerk and hack who treated them like they were worthless, who looked at them and saw only primitive amulet kissers who throw themselves on the graves of great rabbis. I want to see Yair Garbuz every minute of every day to remember the pain of my parents, what they had to suffer in order for me to get where I got. The fruit and fish guys in the Shuk were not the only ones to take Yair Garbuz's speech the way they took Yair Garbuz's speech the next day. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, I heard someone yesterday talk about mezuzah kissers with contempt. Kissers of mezuzo. When did it become a crime to kiss a mezuzah? We know where we came from, we know what country we came back to, we know what we are preserving. We know about our traditions and our heritage, which is the foundation of our future kissers of mezuzot. And of course, the Prime Minister, who has a talent for amplifying and exploiting insult, he swapped Yair Garbuz's criticism of people who kiss amulets for people who kiss the mezuzah on the frame of every door, which is more of a mainstream custom that many more people were raised to follow I know I was than were raised to kiss kabbalistic mystical magical amulets. But Benjamin Netanyahu's exaggeration worked because say what you will in spirit, it was right. It was not an over interpretation to hear in Yair Garbuz's words his anger and antipathy for religious sorts and most of all probably Sephardi or Mizrahi religious sorts for whom visiting the graves of righteous rabbi, rabbis and consulting healers and such is probably more common than it is among the Jews whose ancestors sojourned through Europe. A few days after his speech at Rabin Square, Yair Garbuz found himself on a talk show with then recently replaced head of the Labour Party, Shelley Yakimovic, arguing that this was not at all what he meant. He had nothing against Svaradim, he detested all primitive sorts equally. But Shelly Yakimovic was not buying it and neither really was anyone else. Naftali Bennett, running at the head of the Jewish Home National Religious Party, said, I will tell you, Mr. Garbooz, who that fringe is. That fringe is people from development towns, people who live in Kiryat Shmona, Shlomi, Nitivot, Sderot, who get up at six in the morning to pray the morning prayers and put on tefillin. That is the fringe you are talking about. And in this fringe are people who for a generation you ran over because of our culture. And I am proud to stand at the head of this fringe. The Sephardi Ultra Orthodox Shas Party, by the day after the demonstration in Rabin Square, already had billboards up all over the country with Yair Garbuz's picture on them alongside the picture of the head of the party, Aryeh Derry, with the tagline who are you to condescend to us? Yair Garbuz always insisted, ever since that night, that he was not talking about Sephardim in particular. He was talking about everyone who had benighted attitudes. And God knows, he said, there are enough Ashkenazim who believe the primitive things they get from their primitive religion that cause them to do primitive things. Terrible, violent and racist primitive things. Almost a year ago, in a lovely long valedictory interview given after he learned he was sick and that it was bad, Yair Garbuz said that recent history had only proven that what he said 10 years before in Rabin Square was right. He said, It is hard for me. I don't like sentences that mean I knew I was right, I told you so. I don't like them. But there were people who warned. And there were people who talked. And I was one of those who talked, and they manipulated my words in the most unbelievable way possible. And the first time we went to Hasid Square, my wife says to me, there is a mother here sitting with a sign, go over and talk to her. Talk to her. And I say to her, what will I say? And she says, go, she will say. So I went. And she says, is it you? And I say to her, yes. And she says, the first warning, it came from you, because you said, the fringe is taking us over. You didn't say this about Mizrahim. They invented that, that true blood libel. But you said, the fringe is taking us over. And the fringe did take us over, end quote. In what seems to be the last interview that Yair Garbuz ever gave, he was asked, would you give the same speech about the fringe all over again? And he answered, quote, I would absolutely give the same speech again. In the elections that took place the Following Tuesday on March 17, the right wing under Benjamin Netanyahu won by the smallest of majorities and ended up forming a coalition of 61 with an opposition of 59. Then and ever since, political scientists have argued about whether Yair Garbuz's speech shifted enough angry votes away from the centrist Zionist Union and away from the centrist Yeshatid Party, both headed by famously Ashkenazi men Buji Herzog and Yair Lapid, to the right to Shas and the Likud and the Kulanu Party, headed by Moshe Kahlon, the very successful kid of a construction worker from Tripoli, who was the surprise success of the election, winning 10 seats, which 10 seats Moshe Kahlon straight away took to Benjamin Netanyahu's government, keeping Netanyahu in office. There are many people who believe to this day that were it not for the 8 minutes and 17 seconds that yer Garbu spoke at Rabin Square, Benjamin and Netanyahu would have been swept from public life in 2015, and everything now would be different than it is. But a person's life, especially the life of a man like Yair Garbuz, who did so much for so long, a person's life can never be reduced to 8 minutes and 17 seconds, no matter how important those minutes and seconds are. And I, who for 11 years have held a great simmering resentment towards Yair Garbuz, whom I always lazily, it must be said, held to account for reminding voters and all the rest of us right before an election that there is still an old elite what Political science professor Asher Cohen calls Ahusli an anagram for Ashkenazi secular, established socialist nationalists who still look at everyone else as somehow less than they are, and who, with a microphone in their hand and a crowd at their feet, are capable of a sort of cluelessness and condescension that are so great that they cannot easily be ignored or forgotten or forgiven, which I think is true. But then, as this week, I read tribute after tribute and memory after memory of the man I came to see that while it is true that this cluelessness and condescension are part of Yair Garbuz's life and legacy, this is not the whole truth. Another thing that Yair Garbuz was, of course, was a painter. In grade school, at the Boruchov School in Givatayim, he studied with Avraham Naton, a Serbian immigrant and painter of renown who showed in galleries and won the prestigious Diesenghaf Prize, all while working in an elementary school. Yair Garbuz was already a painter of recognized promise when at 16, he left home to live and work on Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon, though a year later, at 17, he started his studies with the man who would have the greatest influence on Yair Garbuz, Rafi Lavi, at the Avni Institute Art Academy in Tel Aviv, which studies Yair Garbuz somehow continued while he went through the army in the Nahl Brigade. Though Rafi Lavi was only seven years older than Yair Garbuz, he was of a different generation, and Rafi Lavi was of a revolutionary character. He was all about new and all about rebellion from the start, challenging what he took to be the insufferable lyricism of the art that had found its way into the galleries of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem ever since the 1930s. Yair Garbuz was still in his teens when Rafi Lavi recruited him to a group of like minded, or at least game young artists who became the Ten plus, who starting in 1965, put on a series of shows of a sort that no one had ever before seen in Israel, based on a manifesto they wrote together on a Drunken Night in August 1965 in Rafi Lavi's apartment. The manifesto saying, among other things, that, quote, it is decided to hold unconventional shows, like shows of just large works, shows of just miniatures, collages, illustrations, slides, shows organized by topics such as nudes, portraits and so on. End quote. The first 10 plus show was held in Tel Aviv, in Masquit, the boutique of invented Indigenous fashion run by Ruth Dayan, Moshe Dayan's brilliant wife, wherein the paintings were all painted on fabric, the same fabric used to make the fashion sold in the store. And after that there was a show of just nudes and a show of flowers and red paintings and round paintings and so on. The ten plus artists paid great attention to materials. It was part of their manifesto that they would make a virtue of the vice of the cheap stuff that was so in Israel in the 1960s, the Rough Paper and rough fabric and yellowing, magazine clippings and thin tin constructions and such. Yair Garbuz was drawn to collage, a form he went back to over and over again throughout his career. His collages and then later his paintings were mostly crowded, jammed with images. In 1999, Yair Garbuz remembered his first visits to Rafi Lavi's apartment. Quote, I dared to look around me and peek into the different rooms and behind the partitions and cabinets that created still more space. It seemed to me that I knew this crowdedness and this clutter. His home struck me as a visualization of my own psychoanalysis. The principle of multiplicity feeds upon itself and always demands more. If there is a bottle of water on the table, and not far from that there is a faucet, then both require backup. That is to say, there must be a reserve bottle of water and a reserve faucet, and naturally there must be the business card of a plan plumber and the business card of a backup plumber, and empty bottles waiting to be filled. In this way, an endless list comes into being, lengthening at every moment. A list of arrangements and tasks that are extraordinarily urgent and utterly non interchangeable. Rafi La Vie carries such lists around with him, and so do I. Every line crossed off the list gives rise to two or more new ones added at the end. That is the secret of the multiplicity of my paintings and end quote. It is, by the way, a source of great pleasure to me that Rafi Lavi's only son is Aviv Lavi, Israel's best environmental reporter and a man of rare gentility and humor. And if not quite a friend, well, at least someone whom I love and admire. In any case, for Yair Garbuz, multiplicity. Different materials, different media, different sorts of images, different sources. Comics, movies, books crowd together on a canvas or board or piece of paper or oak tag. And this crowding of all different sorts together, it is the heart of his art. The catalog of a show Yair Garbus held at the Gordon Gallery here in Tel Aviv during the Corona starts with this. This exhibition overflows its banks. It spills beyond its edge, beyond its banks, it goes outside the lines. Paintings alone are not enough for this exhibition. It invades texts, songs, essays. Language, too, is too cramped to contain it. And so it cracks fissures within it. It shifts trains of familiar words off their tracks. This exhibition is noisy. It seethes, it stammers, it rattles, it coughs, it clears its throat, it sputters to life. It coughs again. It chokes, it vomits, it spits. It bursts into loud laughter and immediately turns grave again. For all this manic noise, after all, cannot conceal its depressive roots. End quote. The reference to language and text, it is not captured. Yair Garbuz's art is full of words, words, words describing why Yair Garbuz said he grew up in a religious home with a religious father and a religious, much older brother, and there was no art on the walls at all. But they had books, plenty of books, and they had books about art. And this is why, when he was in need of inspiration throughout his life, it was to bookstores and libraries that he would go. And there is something he said that is Jewish about this, about the inseparability of images from words, of anything from wor, and of the real world from its representations. Which is why he said, the very good, very Jewish old Yiddish joke has one man visiting another man's house and saying, what a fine, beautiful young woman your daughter has grown into. And the first man says back, ah, if you think she is beautiful in person, wait until you see her in a photograph. And watching Yair Garbuz telling this joke to explain his art, its obsessiveness, its Bruegelian saturation, its fascination with words, I get all at once just how Jewish an artist Yair Garbuz is, how much he really accepted the challenge of the Zionism of his immigrant parents from Poland, which was to give their kids the tools and the energy they would need to take the Judaism of their parents and to transform it into something altogether different for their grandchildren. This was Yair Garbuz's life's work. And when you see that this was his life's work, work, you get why. What he took to be the old kind of Judaism that he saw rising again around him was such an affront to the man I once interviewed, Tomi Lapid, Yair Lapid's father. He was Minister of Justice and the head of a big party committed to getting ultra Orthodox Jews out of yeshivas and into the army in the workforce. He was a remarkable man. I've never met anyone with his charisma. And after he sat me down at the table in his office and had his secretary bring me a glass of water, he. He said, I know you're going to make me look bad in your book, like a man with an irrational and unfair hatred of haredim. But what I really am is a maskil. By which he meant one of those 18th and 19th century advocates of Jewish enlightenment, of adopting Western ways and Western science and believing in progress and that rights are a universal thing, and that before we are Jews, we are human beings. Tomi Lapid said, I am a Maskir, and a Maskiel is a sort of Jew. A Maskiel is a real Jew. The fight I am leading against the haredim and against religious narishkite in general, amulets and magical rabbis and all the rest, it is a fight that has been going on for more than 200 years. And this is my fight, but also this is our fight, because where else are we going to fight it than in a Jewish state? And this was the moment when I realized that all along I'd been exactly wrong, when I thought that Tomilapid was somehow against Judaism or against Judaism in the public square square. Tomi Lapid was fighting for Judaism, including Judaism, in the public square. Just a particular sort of muskilic, enlightened judaism. More than 20 years have passed since I spoke with Tomi Lapid, now of blessed memory. And it took until this week for me to realize that the same thing is true of Yair Garbus. He was a man who devoted his life to making art and to making satire and to making politics that would allow us to be good Jews, the way he understood what it is to be a good Jew. And I do not agree with Yair Garbuz or with Tomilapid about kissers of amulets and people who visit the graves of the righteous, who find meaning in what their parents did and what their parents parents did, all of which to me seems just beautiful. But what Yair Garbuz and Tomilapid thought, this Jewish state that we all live in is for keeping going this argument that started more than 200 years ago. Not only do I think that they're right about that, I think too that this is why I wanted to live here in the first place and why I want to live here now, so that Yair Garbus can say what he said in Rabin Square, and so that the guy that I buy my avocados from can hang his picture in his stand as a homage to his parents from theft. My hope is that all of them, Yair Garbuz and tomilapid, my avocado guy, the people who go to Uman each Rosh Hashanah to start the New Year at the grave of Rabbi Nachman. My hope is that all of these people who like the flowers really don't go together, may someday somehow learn still to go together in the place, the whole purpose of which is to make them somehow go together together. May Yair Garbuz's memory be for a blessing. Today. Two Discussions Discussion one Strange High IQ bedfellows playing three dimensional chess as Iran this week attacks with vigor and some success the Fujairah oil industry zone as well as Emirate tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and as Israel transfers its newest, most advanced laser based missile defense system to the United Arab Emirates, and as the UAE lately withdrew after decades from the OPEC oil cartel, and as the Emirates have this week lobbied hard for the US and Israel to renew their out and out war against Iran, we will smack our foreheads with the butt of our palms and say, my God, should we have been paying much more attention to the UAE all along? Are they our beshert? Our brother from another mother? Should we be more hobnobby with Abu Dhabi? You know what I'm talking about. And discussion College days. That's daze spelled D A Z E. What as it's graduation season, people, and we will turn our days back to campus and especially to some recent Brew Ha Ha's Gordon Lafer's University of Oregon, where a talk by beauty queen goodwill ambassador Noah Kochba was canceled for fear that Noah might be harmed, which is uncool, man. And the University of Michigan, where a professor giving a charge presented pro Palestinian activists on campus as moral role models act at graduation. And back on the east coast at jts, where students petitioned their chancellor to cancel Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog's planned commencement address on the grounds that he is divisive and maybe genocidal. All of which maybe pales in comparison to a shallow dive that I took into very recent social science quote unquote research about Israel, Palestine, Zionism and colonialism. It'll be back to college for the three of us. And then for our most unreasonably generous Patreon supporters in our extra special special extra discussion, the link to which you can find in our show notes on your podcast app or@patreon.com promised podcast on the World Wide Web. We will make the most of having Gordon with us. When we have him with us, hopefully he will agree and ask, is there a place and future for quote unquote, liberal Zionism and liberal Zionists outside of Israel? Or is liberal Zionist identity, which describes most everyone I know and love back in America, basically impossible to inhabit these days if it's not impossible to occupy? What does liberal Zionism look like today and what might it look like tomorrow? We will ask. But before we get to any of that, listen to this. That song is Yamim Levanim. The words are by Leah Goldberg, the music is by Shlomo Yidov and it is here sung by Mor La Vie. I've never liked him more new music for these days of the sort we will listen to over the course of the show. And now it is time for our first discussion. So, Alice, using the podcast's very extensive network of high level contacts in the world of Middle east diplomacy, we managed to get our hands on this authentic bit of audio of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed or mbz speaking with Prime Minister Netanyahu. I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich.