Congratulations to Tablet contributor Adam Kirsch, winner of the 2010 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism, a new award named for a celebrated Proust scholar and founding member of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. In his books column, Kirsch has been providing our readers with brilliant and probing coverage of volumes on topics as wide-ranging as Jewish comedy, Palestinian poetry, and Zionist theology. If you haven’t been keeping up with his kaleidoscopic literary investigations, catch up here.

Kirsch shares the prize with Marcela Valdes, a writer and editor who specializes in Latin American arts and culture. In her acceptance speech, she shared this insight on her craft: “I believe that all good criticism must begin with a serious attempt at understanding… We can all understand a book and loathe it. But without that first step, criticism slides into egoism—and that is the most vulgar corruption of our art.” We hope to hear a lot more from both talented winners.

Adam Kirsch And Marcela Valdes Win The Center For Fiction’s First Roger Shattuck Prizes For Criticism [booktrade]

David L. Ulin delves into the short stories of Deborah Eisenberg, a “commentator on modern manners, a writer with a laser-sharp and ruthless eye”; he speaks to the author about the fact that she is “less interested in Jewishness as a category than as an attitude.” Liel Liebovitz examines this week’s haftorah and concludes that, when it comes to faith, “it’s not blind adherence to the rules that is paramount, but rather some elusive spirit.” And there’s much more to come, all day on The Scroll.

George Mitchell at a meeting with Shimon Peres in Jerusalem today.

Jim Hollander-Pool/Getty Images

• U.S. envoy George Mitchell has arrived in Israel and met with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and is also set to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. “We don’t go to meet just to meet,” says a U.S. rep. “We go there because we have some indication that both sides are willing to engage seriously on the issues.” [Reuters]

• Netanyahu, for his part, has indicated that he is open to an interim agreement establishing a Palestinian state with temporarily assigned borders. [Haaretz]

• Club Med has canceled a planned stop in Lebanon on its Mediterranean cruise after the Simon Wiesenthal Center protested the fact that passengers with Israeli stamps in their passports would not be allowed to participate. [WJC]

• The president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain has protested the demolition of a historic Jewish community-owned former hospital in Tangiers, Morocco, despite the fact that the locals had consented to the razing. [JTA]

• Richard Goldstone responds to an article in which South Africa’s chief rabbi Warren Goldstein wrote that he believes the judge should be able to attend his grandson’s bar mitzvah despite the fact that “he has done so much wrong in the world,” saying: “I was dismayed that the chief rabbi would so brazenly politicise the occasion.” [Business Day]

• The legendary Leonard Nimoy, 79, announced his retirement from show business. [Before It's News]

• The Christian Broadcasting Network features an interview with photojournalist David Rubinger, who has documented much of Israel’s history and describes the face of the first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion as “Like granite.” [CBN]

• Israel’s national museum unveiled a restored Renaissance-era Hebrew manuscript documenting Jewish law and adorned with gold and gems. [AP]

• Los Angeles’s South Robertson Neighborhood Council has elected Orthodox 15-year-old Rachel Lester, the youngest elected public representative in the city. [JTA]

• Virginia has recalled a license plate reading “14CV88,” allegedly a coded reference to Hitler. That may sound paranoid, but check out the photo of the truck that boasted it. [AP via VIN]

In 11th century Spain, where the great Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi composed many of his masterworks, poetry was, for the educated classes, the language of everyday life. In his biography of Halevi, published this year by Nextbook Press, Hillel Halkin describes the young Halevi improvising poetry (about the pleasures of wine, of course) in a busy tavern—which, Halkin explains, would not have been an unusual way to spend an evening. “If calling an age ‘poetic’ refers, not to some supposed collective sublimity or imaginativeness of mind, but, more mundanely, to the widespread use of poetry in ordinary life as a medium of communication and social exchange, the young man was born in one of the most historically poetic of ages,” Halkin writes. “Poems were an everyday vehicle for the expression of emotion; for the sending of messages and requests; for the carrying of news from one encampment to another; for the recording and remembering of unusual events; for the wooing of the opposite sex; for the enhancement of celebrations; for the flattering of authority; for the vaunting of one’s exploits; for the praising of one’s friends and the derogation of one’s enemies, and the like.”

21st century America is a little bit different. For most of us, poetry is something outside of the everyday—but to celebrate National Poetry Month, Tablet is trying to be a bit more like medieval Spain by including a Halevi poem, in Halkin’s new translation, on the Scroll each afternoon. In today’s poem, Halevi speaks of the traumatic suddenness of his departure from Spain when he set out for Jerusalem: “I had no time to kiss my friends or family a last farewell.” Enjoy your daily drink of Andalusian wine below—or download and print out a pocket-sized version here. Plus, check out a bonus poetry feature from our archives, and don’t forget to enter Nextbook Press and Tablet Magazine’s Yehuda Halevi poetry contest!

Has a new Flood drowned the alnd
And left no patch of dry ground,
Neither bird, beast, nor man?
Has nothing remained?
A strip of bare sand
Would be balm for the mind;
The dreariest plain,
A pleasure to scan.
But all that is seen
Is a ship and the span
Of the sea and the sky, and Leviathan
As he churns up the brine,
Which grips the ship as the hand
Of a thief grips his find.
Let it foam! My heart bounds
As I near the Lord’s shrine.

A step up from “pull my finger.”

Hitler at the opening ceremonies for the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Getty Images

Although, as Liel Liebovitz wrote in his article on Hitler as internet meme (a phenomenon that may be a thing of the past, as the production company behind Downfall, the much-spoofed film that sparked the trend, has filed copyright claims and removed most videos from YouTube), “we know—we feel!—that there could never really be another Hitler to terrify and enrage us so purely as the original once had,” more evidence continues to stoke our furies against the one true Führer.

In his recent book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, Jeffrey Herf claims that “The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would have been over long ago were it not for the uncompromising, religiously inspired hatred of the Jews that was articulated and given assistance by Nazi propagandists and continued after the war by Islamists of various sorts.” One example comes from a 1942 message broadcast to the Middle East in which Hitler announced: “Your only hope for rescue is the destruction of the Jews before they destroy you!” The transcript for this and 6,000 other broadcasts were held as classified by Washington until 1977, and two years ago Herf became the first scholar to examine them.

Roots of Islamic Fundamentalism Lie in Nazi Propaganda for Arab World, Book Claims [Telegraph]

Photoillustration by Tablet Magazine; photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images

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Fish and chips, which apparently Jews introduced to the United Kingdom.

iStockphoto

The British Jewish Chronicle asked some locals for suggestions on improving the community. A few of the ideas fit right in with the trends of the moment—one rabbi suggests a comprehensive online community, another proposes the Sabbath as an example of green living. One writer made us groan with his suggestion that we put more emphasis on our food and embrace a “Jews did it first!” attitude: “Fishmongers should remind us that it was Jews who first brought fish and chips to the UK.” But a few voices brought up some intriguing innovations.

Journalist Keren David wants to see synagogue membership fees replaced by a “communal income tax” to support social services, education, cemeteries, and other needs. She cites Amsterdam as an example, where, she says, Jews who opt in “are charged a proportion of their annual income to join—three per cent for the richest members, less for lower incomes.” Jonathan Boyd, executive director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, sees a sukkah/homeless shelter/soup kitchen in London’s Trafalgar Square: “Could we take a symbol of our own homelessness, and turn it into a shelter for those who need no symbolic reminders of what it means to have no home?” Keith Kahn-Harris, another research expert, envisions taking the trend toward multi-denominational Judaism a step further and incorporating members of other religions: “Jews, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus and others should collaborate to build a space that can serve for worship and community activities. This would allow different groups to pool resources, and improve the often strained relations between religions.” While this is a cool idea, and not entirely without precedent, his acknowledgment that “There would, of course, be difficulties in making this kind of community” may be understating the case.

But to us, the most striking idea comes from Neil Bradman of The Centre for Genetic Anthropology, and it’s more of a plea than a suggestion. Bradman laments the disparity between rabbinical dictates and the actual lives of Jews. We are all too familiar with the tendency of religiously inclined folks to say one thing and do another behind closed doors, and even growing up in a rabbinical family, we vividly remember “parking around the corner” at synagogue to avoid the appearance of breaking the Sabbath. “Let us strike a blow for honesty. If this is the way we wish to live, let us appoint rabbis who say it is acceptable to do so,” writes Bradman. “It is a game of ‘we pretend to respect you and you pretend to be respected’. It is unhealthy and it breeds hypocrisy.” Here, here.

We Need to Transform the Community. This is How. [JC]

After eight years of research, Berlin’s Free University has just launched a new internet database of more than 21,000 artworks declared “degenerate” by the Nazis. 1937, the Nazis seized art they found “contrary to Aryan ideals” from German museums and displayed it shoddily along with “racist slogans denigrating the artists for ‘insulting German womanhood’ and revealing ’sick minds.’” Artists of these condemned pieces include Marc Chagall, Max Beckman, and Wassily Kandinsky. Wherever possible, the site will offer information on a work’s siege, and, if it survived, let viewers know where it ended up.

We’re not sure whether the archive will include film, as the English version hasn’t yet launched (but should be coming soon). In the meantime, a glimpse into the delightfully “degenerate” world of filmmaker Hans Richter in his piece “One More Ghost Before Breakfast,” the original sound version of which was destroyed by the Nazis:

‘Degenerate Art’ Database Shows 21,000 Works Seized by Nazis [Bloomberg]