When Facebook Becomes Blogging

 For the most of you who don't know who Ari Roth is, it's difficult to convey how shocking this is. Five years ago, Ari Roth was forced out of Theater J for making them produce works that took the Palestinian point of view into account. Now he's being thrown out of the new theater company he formed for not producing work that only takes the Palestinian view into account. Maybe it's jingoism or parochial provincialism, but I will always believe that while Jews are self-evidently no more morally reliable than anybody else, the continual Jewish centrality to world history makes Jewish issues a particularly reliable canary in the coal mine, so no matter how obviously horrible the American right is and how clearly they are the current imminent threat, the speed with which the far left has gone mainstream is bad news for the country, and especially bad news for Jews. We will all eventually pay a price for it, but Jews particularly.

Dear Boychik - First 3500 Words

 Dear Boychik, 

I guess I'm supposed to be writing this for you but I know it's really for your tateh who's just making me to write all this down even though he knows every bisl of it and like he always does he's forcing me to do his work for him, but still, it's for you more than anybody else because it's important that you know our meicehs and your tateh always gets the details wrong so I guess he's right that it's better that I tell you myself. Nobody gets the details right but me. Still, he should have paid better attention. 

He should have paid better attention when I spoke to him in Yiddish too, but like every other responsibility your farshtunkeneh tateh and his briders dodged, they refused to speak back to me in Yiddish so now they don't know bupkes and Yiddish is gonna die out with me. So I guess I can't write this in Yiddish because I'm gonna die soon and if I don't live long enough to teach you deh mameloshen, you wouldn't be able to read this at all. But gott in himmel you're gonna learn some Yiddish even if those goyisheh kinder of mine take you out every Sunday for a ham!

Right now, your Mameh is in the hospital geboring you, and for your tateh it's probably a very geboring process just like it was for me. I told him to bring a camera with him to the hospital so he can film your birth just like I filmed his. We didn't need the footage, but it gave me something to do while your Bubbie got all the attention and accolades, and if your Bubbie ever buys too much crap, I can always threaten to accidentally email the birth video to her friends. 

So what your tateh wants is for me to tell you the story of your mishpocheh. I don't think that's the real reason. I think the real reason is to give me something to do while he's raising the baby so that I don't tell him all the things they're doing wrong with you. You haven't even been geboren yet and I already know every mistake they're going to make. They're gonna hold you wrong, they're gonna hit you too lightly to burp you, they're gonna set the temperature in your room too warm, they're gonna mix the formula wrong and feed you at the wrong times, they're gonna buy the brand soap and oil, they're gonna buy you baby food rather than just put their food in a blender, they're gonna want to buy new cribs and carseats when we've got perfectly good ones in the garage from when your tateh and uncles were young, they're gonna buy new outfits and try to get out of dressing you with old baby clothes every day, and just so you know, all that money they spend is coming out of your inheritance, but I've promised your Bubbie that I would keep myself busy so that you stay the person they want to murder rather than me. 

I don't know when you would read this, maybe your tateh wants to give this to you as a Bar Mitzvah present, or maybe when you go off to college, or maybe when you get married, but I don't know how he would even keep track of it until then. I know your tateh, he's kind of lazy. He doesn't misplace things nearly as often as I do, but I'm eber buttel, I have a lokhen kop that's only getting larger. That's why I have a system to keep track of everything. The most important thing you can have as you get older is a system to remember where everything is. He doesn't have a system, so he's probably going to lose this a couple days after I give it to him. But if I go completely eber buttel before you're old enough to remember me, the most important advice I can give to you is "Have a place where you put everything important." When you're old enough, always remind your tateh to remind you to have a place where you put everything. Always have a backup: make a duplicate key for your house and leave it with your parents, make a duplicate for the car and put it in a magnet on the back bumper, have a basket at home where you always put your wallet and keys, always write reminders before you go to bed of everything you have to do tomorrow, always write down every password on a piece of paper and put it in the basket, and always, all the time, alle mol, take care of everything right away and never put anything off until the last minute: putting toys away, doing homework, filling applications, making a shopping list, cleaning the house and the yard and the car, getting the oil changed, and especially paying bills. Your uncle is particularly shreklekh at that. 

The system is everything: it's how you survive, it's how we survive, it's how your mishpoche, your nation, survived a million tzuris. The whole emuneh of the people you were born into is based on this system, and if the velt is about to be something we have to survive again, it's because people stopped following the system. Nothing else matters: faith, love, kindness, intelligence, those are all nice, but sometimes they go away and sometimes they come back. If you want to survive, if you want your kinder to survive, having the system in place to follow is the only thing that matters.

Everybody hates it when I get ongeblozen about this drek, especially your uncle, but soon I'll be dead, and they can do whatever they want. Everybody also says that I'm exaggerating when I say I'm gonna die soon, and I always have the suspicion it can't come soon enough for them, sometimes I wonder if it can't come soon enough for me either. That's why I've left instructions with my lawyer that on the night after you become a Bar Mitzvah, your first responsibility as a man is to put a pillow over my face as I'm sleeping - that is, if your Bubbie hasn't done that to me already, since I'm pretty sure that's been her plan since our first date fifty years ago. 

So the place to start is to tell you about the town you come from. Not Baltimore, where you're going to live, or Pikesville, where you should be living if your Tateh understood how much easier he would have it if he lived closer to us, but Bransk, the shtetl you come from, the place your great-grandparents were born, the town where two hundred fifty years of Charlaps lived before you. 

Your last name, Charlap, is an acronym standing for 'Khiya, Rosh l'Galut Polin.' Which means one of three things. 

1. That we might be direct descendents of a Rabbi so important that he gets his own acronym, and all the best Rabbis get acronyms. 

2. One of your descendents was really smart for a Pollock - though your uncle tells me that slurs like Pollock are considered offensive now, but since this slur is about white people I think it's ok. 

3. One of your ancestors was a brilliant medieval Jewish merchant who realized that he could mark up his prices if he lied about his ancestry and exaggerated his Yikhes. 

As it happens, my cousin Yonatan recently emailed me and told me, with lots of exclamation points, that Charlap means 'Khiya, Rosh l'Galut l'Portugal,' not 'Polin', so apparently we're Portuguese and Sephardic Jews after all who came to Poland only after about two-hundred years in Salonica, which is a city in Greece, and Greece is just about the only major country where part of your family didn't live during my lifetime. But it would seem that most Jews arrived in Poland a little after 1500, just after they were expelled from Spain and Portugal, I don't think anybody knows how we ended up in Bransk, but some Jews left Salonica in the 1680s after a bunch of Jewish followers of a false messiah named Shabbetai Tzvi converted to Islam and moved to Salonica to establish their new community there - there goes the neighborhood....  

Bransk was a shtetl in Northeast Poland - 'shtetl' is a Yiddish word meaning "here we buy wholesale." There were about six-thousand inhabitants, half Jews, half Christians, mostly farmers, a town which never produced a single person of any note or distinction - here in America, we would call the inhabitants of a town like Bransk hicks. 

Jews aren't supposed to be hicks, though your cousin who hasn't had a job since he mooned his boss sure acts like one, but the truth is your whole family is Jewish hillbillies on every side, you, me, your tateh, your Bubbie, probably your mameh and her family too, though your Bubbie doesn't want me to ask your Sabba and Savta about their background because she thinks it'll start a fight about Trump. 

According to wikipedia, the key event in Bransk history seems to be in 1264, the same year as the Statute of Kalisz, which guaranteed Polish Jews protection against blood libels (we'll explain what that is later but for the moment, just think Jeffrey Epstein crossed with Hannibal Lecter), and forced baptisms (think Ernie in a bathtub with Mel Gibson). 1264 seems to be the year of the "famous" Battle of Bransk, which pitted the Yotvingians, a poorly armed tribe from whom the Lithuanians descend - more on them later too - against the mighty Krakovians, for whom the great city of Krakow was christened - a city later that was later the center of the Polish Renaissance, which is a bit like saying that Lakewood, New Jersey is where all the Jewish football players come from. But Krakow would find a lot of fame around the time your Tateh was born because it's the city that produced the first Polish Pope, who believe it or not, is involved with your family's history. 

It's tough to know what to say about our family before your alter Zaydie's parents were born. It's not like there are family stories handed down about your ancestor Yechiel who smoked opium in front of the Golden Calf, it's only right before my father was born that there's any historical documentation of our family at all. When your uncle Joel was born, your alter-zaydie wanted us to name him after his alter-zaydie, Velvl Daniil. I didn't even know he had a great-grandfather named Velvl Daniil. 

So by the time Joel was three and your father was seven, a West Highland Terrier started yelping outside our house for days. Day after day, the tiny bitch screaming outside my window every five seconds. I told your Bubbie not to give him any water and he would leave, but of course she gave him water when I wasn't watching. I told her not to feed him, but of course she gave him leftover dinner when I was in the bedroom. I absolutely, positively, would not let the dog in the house, but when I had almost ready to give him away, your uncle Abe started crying and screaming every day. I hate dogs so much, and I hated that hoont more than I hate Arafat, so eventually I had to keep him. By then, your alter-Zaydie couldn't even remember his own name, so instead of Joel, we named the dog Velvl. 

But the family lore does not begin with Velvl Daniil, it begins with a dream from my own Zaydie, who I never met. He might have been a hundred-fifteen years old by the time I was born. 

Rebbe Yaakov Kharlap: he was a small town rabbi who wasn't even the Rabbi for his town. Just a kheder instructor, where he taught Jewish boys only a few years older than you how to write Hebrew letters, how to daven, how to read, how to memorize pages of Torah and Talmud - and if he was to his students anything like he was to my tateh, he probably used a ruler on them for every mistake they made. 

The story goes that when he was fifty years old and his wife Miriam was forty-five, an angel appeared to him in a dream. They'd been married for thirty years, but in all that time, they'd never conceived a single child. The angel in the dream told Rebbe Yaakov that his wife would bear him twelve sons, all of whom would survive into adulthood, and Reb Yaakov must name the twelve after the twelve sons of Israel. 

Well personally, I think the story is completely meshuggeh. If Reb Yaakov and Miriam were that old, and there's no way to really know, then there's certainly no way the kids were entirely theirs. I think all his children were probably just cheder orphans he adopted and Miriam took care of, and Reb Yaakov was meshuggeh, so he changed all their names to be named after the twelve tribes of Israel. 

But anyway, that's the story. And there were definitely eleven boys and a girl: Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naftali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulun, Dinah, and Yosef. And if there's still family resemblance between them all now? Well, it's the shtetl, we're all inbreds. 

Apparently Reb Yaakov had a rich twin brother, Ezra, who had a factory in Bialystok, the nearest city. Ezra sent Reb Yaakov money every week for his enormous family, but Ada was an 'enlightened' woman of the 'Haskalah' - never mind what the Haskalah means but depending on who you ask it's either the best or the worst thing that ever happened to us. Ada apparently couldn't stand Reb Yaakov, thinking he was just a nar from khandrikeville, and my father always referred to her 'die mechashayfeh' so I'm guessing the feeling was always mutual. 

Whatever the fights were about, they clearly centered on money. Ezra sent his brother enough money that for shtetl dwellers living on a cheder stipend, they could live pretty well. Your greicer-onkle Jake still has the silver menorah Tateh buried before the war and dug up to take with him on the boat over here - and of course who should get that menorah after he died could have been a huge fight, so I let him take it. We showed him though, we found the same design menorah on ebay for a hundred twenty-five! 

But whether or not Reb Yaakov was ever worried about money, he was terribly worried about his career. He was apparently thirteen years old when Rebbe Chaim Schkop came to Bransk, and Rabbi Schkop was always dying, but he never died. Apparently he could never even stand up and just issued rulings from a bed installed in his Bet-Din (think People's Court for frummies). 

But on the very day Rebbe Schkop gave up the neshawmeh, in his eighties, just a year before my Tateh was born, Rebbe Yaakov fainted in his kheder. He'd been functioning for years as basically the town Rebbe, school melamed, din-torah and tateh tsu tsvelf kinder and was already in his seventies. 

The town makhers wrote immediately to the Mirrer Yeshiva about a miraculous emergency in which the Rebbe and his Yursh dropped dead in the same hour (give or take a few...). Reb Yaakov had come to within an hour and was back to work the next day. But just a few days before his initial installation, the Mirer Rosh Yeshiva wrote back that after much discussion, the Rabbis at Mir had ruled that this was a sign that Bransk would require a Rabbi destined for great things, and one of their grayster yunge khkhams was already on his way to become the new Bransker Rebbe. 

Nobody told Rebbe Yaakov until the day of his installment. They didn't want to make him faint again. But just as his kinder were packing the house to move into the Rebbe's heus and he came over a little early to figure out with the carpenter how to move Rebbe Schkop's bed out of the Bet Din, he saw a young boy he'd never seen before next to a young girl holding a baby. The carpenter called this young boy Rebbe Zilbershteyn. 

But if Rebbe Yaakov's career went nowhere, his family life was clearly overpopulated. Still, he needed one more son to complete the set: a Charlap who'd complete the vision of his dream that he would name Binyamin. That Binyamin was your Tateh's Zaydie, Benjamin Charlap. 

The day of your alteh-Zaydie's birth was a pretty terrible one: Rosh Hashana 1899. Apparently a couple of deh briders used to hang out in the cemetery, they were apparently the 'cool' shtetlers known as 'Deh Kharlap Khaleriyas'; they'd smoke cigarettes, they'd probably pish on the tombstone of the Rebbe, and I'm sure they'd brag about all deh sheyneh Branskeh maydlach they felt up in the barns. But apparently one day your uncle Shimon, who was clearly a hot tempered type, got roughed up by a gang of Polish hoodlums who left him for dead after he told them that their priests and boyars were murderers. I mean.... he was probably right, but don't let anybody tell you Jews are smart, some Jews if they were twice as smart they'd be idiots. But apparently later that same day, your uncle Asher killed one of the Polish kids who roughed up Shimon so he already had to leave Bransk before the big news. 

What was the fight about? Well, this all was during the Dreyfus years, a story which nobody really cares about now except Jews and the truth is, maybe we shouldn't have cared about it even then. Being one of us is trouble enough, but we have this way of making trouble for ourselves whenever some shtik drek oysshteller thinks he can climb the goyisheh ladder and then has the kind of shlekhteh mazel every Yid has to expect when they think they can be a greyceh goy. 

Of course, boychik, Dreyfus wasn't any schtik drek. These na'ars had to know who Dreyfus was. There was no Jew who didn't know in 1899. And for five years, Reb Yaakov probably was the only Jew in Bransk with enough money and literacy for a newspaper subscription - he probably bludgeoned his kinder's oyers with every new detail of Dreyfus and his legal dybbuks. He probably brought new news of Dreyfus to the denizens of the Bransk shul, all of them his former talmids, who never much considered why they cared so much for the tzuris of a wealthy Jew in the French military who after after five years in prison would probably shpay on them in the street. They probably cared much more about Reb Yaakov's vissen and khokhma than they ever did when they were his students. Reb Yaakov probably told his kinder every day over breakfast after their mother would awaken them at four-thirty every morning to milkh deh kauz and plau de felds before they go to shul for Schacharis, and then tzu arbet. 

It probably wasn't until 1896 that Reb Dreyfus would come onto the mental radar of a shlemazel like Reb Yaakov, when it became known that Dreyfus's exile to a prison island was a framing to cover for a mer vikhtik officer with much greater Yuchus: Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. Why did they put a Dreyfus away and not an Esterhazy? Because the Esterhazy's were the Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (I'm not gonna explain the Austro-Hungarian Empire to you, because even though your farshtunkiner teachers probably never told you about Dreyfus, I'm sure they never told you about Austria-Hungary, and there are some gaps in education for which there's no hope that your generation will ever fill), and however rich the Dreyfus family might have been, Dreyfus is just the name of another German town Jews were expelled from in the Middle Ages. You do the math boychik.

But it wasn't until 1897, when the Dreyfus Affair was reopened and Esterhazy was acquitted after a two day trial that all the Reb Yaakov's went meshuggeh. This Yid who barely knew he was a Yid was suddenly the grayseter Yid of us all. Their shtures got even worse when Esterhazy fled to England, and doubled even again when Dreyfus was re-tried and found guilty, and reached its hits grad as the mob outside the courthouse changed 'Death to the Jews!'

You can even imagine the scenes the Dreyfus-khopteh caused in Bransk. You can imagine Rebbitzin Zilbershteyn's mother weeping loudly in the synagogue whenever she heard the name Dreyfus. Imagine how he probably got a special M'shebeirach every Shabbos from Khazzen Nudler, from which everybody in shul competes for who can shout 'AMEN' the loudest!

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

 For years I've been telling anybody enabling enough of me to listen to my ranting that we have to be restrained with Republicans. Not because they're reasonable and democratic, but because they're not, and there's no such thing as taking on a cult of millions casually. Non-partisan groups have now certified this as the safest election in modern American history (and I was WRONG about that), so now a good three-quarters of Trump voters deny the election's legitimacy. This is, quite literally, the red line. You don't make a 'federal case' out of people doing anything less than not recognizing a government's legitimacy, because what it takes to reel a party that unwieldy back in is world-historic. We've tried politics, and politics hasn't worked. War is the extension of politics by other means. We don't know yet what 'war' means in this case, but now, we're at war.

Dear Boychik - First 3000 Words

 Dear Boychik, 

I guess I'm supposed to be writing this for you but I know it's really for your tateh who's just making me to write all this down even though he knows every bisl of it and like he always does he's forcing me to do his work for him, but still, it's for you more than anybody else because it's important that you know our meicehs and your tateh always gets the details wrong so I guess he's right that it's better that I tell you myself. Nobody gets the details right but me. Still, he should have paid better attention. 

He should have paid better attention when I spoke to him in Yiddish too, but like every other responsibility your farshtunkener tateh and his briders dodged, they refused to speak back to me in Yiddish so now they don't know bupkes and Yiddish is gonna die out with me. So I guess I can't write this in Yiddish because I'm gonna die soon and if I don't live long enough to teach you the mameloshen, you wouldn't be able to read this at all. But got in himmel you're gonna learn some Yiddish even if those goyisher kinder of mine take you out every Sunday for a ham!

Right now, your Mameh is in the hospital geboring you, and for your tateh it's probably a very geboring process just like it was for me. I told him to bring a camera with him to the hospital so he can film your birth just like I filmed his. We didn't need the footage, but it gave me something to do while your Bubbie got all the attention and accolades, and if your Bubbie ever buys too much crap, I can always threaten to accidentally email the birth video to her friends. 

So what your tateh wants is for me to tell you the story of your mishpocheh. I don't think that's the real reason. I think the real reason is to give me something to do while he's raising the baby so that I don't tell him all the things they're doing wrong with you. You haven't even been geboren yet and I already know every mistake they're going to make. They're gonna hold you wrong, they're gonna hit you too lightly to burp you, they're gonna set the temperature in your room too warm, they're gonna mix the formula wrong and feed you at the wrong times, they're gonna buy the brand soap and oil, they're gonna buy you baby food rather than just put their food in a blender, they're gonna want to buy new cribs and carseats when we've got perfectly good ones in the garage from when your tateh and uncles were young, they're gonna buy new outfits and try to get out of dressing you with old baby clothes every day, and just so you know, all that money they spend is coming out of your inheritance, but I've promised your Bubbie that I would keep myself busy so that you stay the person they want to murder rather than me. 

I don't know when you would read this, maybe your tateh wants to give this to you as a Bar Mitzvah present, or maybe when you go off to college, or maybe when you get married, but I don't know how he would even keep track of it until then. I know your tateh, he's kind of lazy. He doesn't misplace things nearly as often as I do, but I'm eber buttel, I have a lokhen kop that's only getting larger. That's why I have a system to keep track of everything. The most important thing you can have as you get older is a system to remember where everything is. He doesn't have a system, so he's probably going to lose this a couple days after I give it to him. But if I go completely eber buttel before you're old enough to remember me, the most important advice I can give to you is "Have a place where you put everything important." When you're old enough, always remind your tateh to remind you to have a place where you put everything. Always have a backup: make a duplicate key for your house and leave it with your parents, make a duplicate for the car and put it in a magnet on the back bumper, have a basket at home where you always put your wallet and keys, always write reminders before you go to bed of everything you have to do tomorrow, always write down every password on a piece of paper and put it in the basket, and always, all the time, alle mol, take care of everything right away and never put anything off until the last minute: putting toys away, doing homework, filling applications, making a shopping list, cleaning the house and the yard and the car, getting the oil changed, and especially paying bills. Your uncle is particularly shreklekh at that. 

The system is everything: it's how you survive, it's how we survive, it's how your mishpoche, your nation, survived a million tzuris. The whole emuneh of the people you were born into is based on this system, and if the velt is about to be something we have to survive again, it's because people stopped following the system. Nothing else matters: faith, love, kindness, intelligence, those are all nice, but sometimes they go away and sometimes they come back. If you want to survive, if you want your kinder to survive, having the system in place to follow is the only thing that matters.

Everybody hates it when I get ongeblozen about this drek, especially your uncle, but soon I'll be dead, and they can do whatever they want. Everybody also says that I'm exaggerating when I say I'm gonna die soon, and I always have the suspicion it can't come soon enough for them, sometimes I wonder if it can't come soon enough for me either. That's why I've left instructions with my lawyer that on the night after you become a Bar Mitzvah, your first responsibility as a man is to put a pillow over my face as I'm sleeping - that is, if your Bubbie hasn't done that to me already, since I'm pretty sure that's been her plan since our first date fifty years ago. 

So the place to start is to tell you about the town you come from. Not Baltimore, where you're going to live, or Pikesville, where you should be living if your Tateh understood how much easier he would have it if he lived closer to us, but Bransk, the shtetl you come from, the place your great-grandparents were born, the town where two hundred fifty years of Charlaps lived before you. 

Your last name, Charlap, is an acronym standing for 'Khiya, Rosh l'Galut Polin.' Which means one of three things. 

1. That we might be direct descendents of a Rabbi so important that he gets his own acronym, and all the best Rabbis get acronyms. 

2. One of your descendents was really smart for a Pollock - though your uncle tells me that slurs like Pollock are considered offensive now, but since this slur is about white people I think it's ok. 

3. One of your ancestors was a brilliant medieval Jewish merchant who realized that he could mark up his prices if he lied about his ancestry and exaggerated his Yikhes. 

As it happens, my cousin Yonatan recently emailed me and told me, with lots of exclamation points, that Charlap means 'Khiya, Rosh l'Galut l'Portugal,' not 'Polin', so apparently we're Portuguese and Sephardic Jews after all who came to Poland only after about two-hundred years in Salonica, which is a city in Greece, and Greece is just about the only major country where part of your family didn't live during my lifetime. But it would seem that most Jews arrived in Poland a little after 1500, just after they were expelled from Spain and Portugal, I don't think anybody knows how we ended up in Bransk, but some Jews left Salonica in the 1680s after a bunch of Jewish followers of a false messiah named Shabbetai Tzvi converted to Islam and moved to Salonica to establish their new community there - there goes the neighborhood....  

Bransk was a shtetl in Northeast Poland - 'shtetl' is a Yiddish word meaning "here we buy wholesale." There were about six-thousand inhabitants, half Jews, half Christians, mostly farmers, a town which never produced a single person of any note or distinction - here in America, we would call the inhabitants of a town like Bransk hicks. 

Jews aren't supposed to be hicks, though your cousin who hasn't had a job since he mooned his boss sure acts like one, but the truth is your whole family is Jewish hillbillies on every side, you, me, your tateh, your Bubbie, probably your mameh and her family too, though your Bubbie doesn't want me to ask your Sabba and Savta about their background because she thinks it'll start a fight about Trump. 

According to wikipedia, the key event in Bransk history seems to be in 1264, the same year as the Statute of Kalisz, which guaranteed Polish Jews protection against blood libels (we'll explain what that is later but for the moment, just think Jeffrey Epstein crossed with Hannibal Lecter), and forced baptisms (think Ernie in a bathtub with Mel Gibson). 1264 seems to be the year of the "famous" Battle of Bransk, which pitted the Yotvingians, a poorly armed tribe from whom the Lithuanians descend - more on them later too - against the mighty Krakovians, for whom the great city of Krakow was christened - a city later that was later the center of the Polish Renaissance, which is a bit like saying that Lakewood, New Jersey is where all the Jewish football players come from. But Krakow would find a lot of fame around the time your Tateh was born because it's the city that produced the first Polish Pope, who believe it or not, is involved with your family's history. 

It's tough to know what to say about our family before your alter Zaydie's parents were born. It's not like there are family stories handed down about your ancestor Yechiel who smoked opium in front of the Golden Calf, it's only right before my father was born that there's any historical documentation of our family at all. When your uncle Joel was born, your alter-zaydie wanted us to name him after his alter-zaydie, Velvl Daniil. I didn't even know he had a great-grandfather named Velvl Daniil. 

So by the time Joel was three and your father was seven, a West Highland Terrier started yelping outside our house for days. Day after day, the tiny bitch screaming outside my window every five seconds. I told your Bubbie not to give him any water and he would leave, but of course she gave him water when I wasn't watching. I told her not to feed him, but of course she gave him leftover dinner when I was in the bedroom. I absolutely, positively, would not let the dog in the house, but when I had almost ready to give him away, your uncle Abe started crying and screaming every day. I hate dogs so much, and I hated that hoont more than I hate Arafat, so eventually I had to keep him. By then, your alter-Zaydie couldn't even remember his own name, so instead of Joel, we named the dog Velvl. 

But the family lore does not begin with Velvl Daniil, it begins with a dream from my own Zaydie, who I never met. He might have been a hundred-fifteen years old by the time I was born. 

Rebbe Yaakov Kharlap: he was a small town rabbi who wasn't even the Rabbi for his town. Just a kheder instructor, where he taught Jewish boys only a few years older than you how to write Hebrew letters, how to daven, how to read, how to memorize pages of Torah and Talmud - and if he was to his students anything like he was to my tateh, he probably used a ruler on them for every mistake they made. 

The story goes that when he was fifty years old and his wife Miriam was forty-five, an angel appeared to him in a dream. They'd been married for thirty years, but in all that time, they'd never conceived a single child. The angel in the dream told Rebbe Yaakov that his wife would bear him twelve sons, all of whom would survive into adulthood, and Reb Yaakov must name the twelve after the twelve sons of Israel. 

Well personally, I think the story is completely meshuggeh. If Reb Yaakov and Miriam were that old, and there's no way to really know, then there's certainly no way the kids were entirely theirs. I think all his children were probably just cheder orphans he adopted and Miriam took care of, and Reb Yaakov was meshuggeh, so he changed all their names to be named after the twelve tribes of Israel. 

But anyway, that's the story. And there were definitely eleven boys and a girl: Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naftali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulun, Dinah, and Yosef. And if there's still family resemblance between them all now? Well, it's the shtetl, we're all inbreds. 

Apparently Reb Yaakov had a rich twin brother, Ezra, who had a factory in Bialystok, the nearest city. Ezra sent Reb Yaakov money every week for his enormous family, but Ada was an 'enlightened' woman of the 'Haskalah' - never mind what the Haskalah means but depending on who you ask it's either the best or the worst thing that ever happened to us. Ada apparently couldn't stand Reb Yaakov, thinking he was just a nar from khandrikeville, and my father always referred to her 'die mechashayfeh' so I'm guessing the feeling was always mutual. 

Whatever the fights were about, they clearly centered on money. Ezra sent his brother enough money that for shtetl dwellers living on a cheder stipend, they could live pretty well. Your greicer-onkle Jake still has the silver menorah Tateh buried before the war and dug up to take with him on the boat over here - and of course who should get that menorah after he died could have been a huge fight, so I let him take it. We showed him though, we found the same design menorah on ebay for a hundred twenty-five! 

But whether or not Reb Yaakov was ever worried about money, he was terribly worried about his career. He was apparently thirteen years old when Rebbe Chaim Schkop came to Bransk, and Rabbi Schkop was always dying, but he never died. Apparently he could never even stand up and just issued rulings from a bed installed in his Bet-Din (think People's Court for frummies). 

But on the very day Rebbe Schkop gave up the neshawmeh, in his eighties, just a year before my Tateh was born, Rebbe Yaakov fainted in his kheder. He'd been functioning for years as basically the town Rebbe, school melamed, din-torah and tateh tsu tsvelf kinder and was already in his seventies. 

The town makhers wrote immediately to the Mirrer Yeshiva about a miraculous emergency in which the Rebbe and his Yursh dropped dead in the same hour (give or take a few...). Reb Yaakov had come to within an hour and was back to work the next day. But just a few days before his initial installation, the Mirer Rosh Yeshiva wrote back that after much discussion, the Rabbis at Mir had ruled that this was a sign that Bransk would require a Rabbi destined for great things, and one of their grayster yunge khkhams was already on his way to become the new Bransker Rebbe. 

Nobody told Rebbe Yaakov until the day of his installment. They didn't want to make him faint again. But just as his kinder were packing the house to move into the Rebbe's heus and he came over a little early to figure out with the carpenter how to move Rebbe Schkop's bed out of the Bet Din, he saw a young boy he'd never seen before next to a young girl holding a baby. The carpenter called this young boy Rebbe Zilbershteyn. 

But if Rebbe Yaakov's career went nowhere, his family life was clearly overpopulated. Still, he needed one more son to complete the set: a Charlap who'd complete the vision of his dream that he would name Binyamin. That Binyamin was your Tateh's Zaydie, Benjamin Charlap. 

The day of your alteh-Zaydie's birth was a pretty terrible one: Rosh Hashana 1899. Apparently a couple of the brothers used to hang out at the gravestone of Rabbi Schkop, they were apparently the 'cool' shtetlers known as 'Deh Kharlap Khaleriyas', and Shimon, who was clearly a hot tempered type, got roughed up by a gang of Polish hoodlums who left him for dead after he told them that their boyars and priests were murderers. Later the same day, Asher killed one of the Polish kids who roughed Shimon so he already had to leave Bransk. 

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

 I know I've said this before, but as annoyed and terrified as I am of facebook, I truly loathe twitter, everything about it, and I loathe it much more than I hate facebook. It's not that facebook isn't evil, I mean, come on, but on facebook, at least there's room for expansion and thought for people who want to use it, and even if it gets heated, there's at least a social contract to prevent it from going code:red on every disagreement among people who go anywhere from loving each other to at very least kindasorta tolerating each other out of some constrictions of the social contract. The danger of facebook is its confirmation bias, and the confirmation bias is only possible because facebook can in fact generate a sense of community, but on twitter, the whole point is simplicity and concision. You can't get to know the poster except through the brightest primary colors, and because you can't get to know them, the postings only encourage opposition. On facebook you can make friends, on twitter, you only find allies. People say that facebook is terrible because of how it's run, but that, in fact, is the whole point of why it's better than twitter. On facebook, there's no crackdowns, and if there were, it would at least be a better format than this. On twitter, there's always crackdowns, and it's still that terrible!

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

 Hot Take from Middle of the Night:

Grammar and language and spelling are literally what we have in common, and society was much further away from the edge when we were all annoying each other by correcting one another's grammar. Now, we're supposed to believe that language is 'evolvative', that it's ok if people don't aspire to speak properly and with maximum specificity, and that there's no correlation between standards relaxing for how we speak and write with all the intellectual poisons that currently hatch from the mud; but when people no longer have a common language, how can anyone be surprised millions of people find it increasingly hard to comprehend each other's thoughts and beliefs? If you don't see the correlation, well,... I should probably correct your spelling more often here.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

So.... as an artist who did try (and fail) to become a political journalist or scientist, the problem with artists becoming active politically is that so many artists know absolutely nothing about politics, and that's clear every time they open their mouths. There isn't a single statistic they can cite (let alone a wrong one), and if you talk to them about concepts from various political thinkers, they don't have the faintest grasp of what you're talking about or why it's important. I've spent my thirties in the world of the arts, and after having talked to hundreds of artists over these years, it's pretty clear that very few of them have done any political reading at all aside from the fashionable book du jour that predigests the world for them in a way that they can take as a theology, and whose concepts they entirely forget about two months later. Generally speaking, the arts are about believing in illusions, and people in the arts are better than anybody at believing in illusions, once upon a time that illusion was god, now it's various forms of progressive social justice, and from the point of view of actionable reality, there's very little difference between them because so many of the concepts involve invisible structural forces that are impossible to prove. So as artists, it's fine if you have neither the time, desire, nor capacity to make a study of important political questions, but if you don't, don't make political art, because art in which you misunderstand the materials you're working with is, almost by definition, bad art, and if the art is dependent on you understanding the political situation, you better damn well make sure you understand it thoroughly.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

 We all have meltdowns over the course of a lifetime that are infinitely regrettable, and we'd like to take back because the object of scorn was thoroughly undeserving and just at the receiving end of meshuggos that has everything to do with us and nothing to do with them. That's how we're trained to see it, and that's obviously how we should be trained. That's well over 90% of them.

But then there are the moments, 1 or 3 out of 50 (and yes, for some of us it's sadly 'by the fifty') when it really is not you, it's them, and it's just as difficult to admit to ourselves that sometimes people really do deserve to be at the receiving end of scorn.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Even after all this, we're still in denial about the extent of the rot. If, as this poll says, 8 in 10 Trump supporters are contesting the election's legitimacy, then that's not a statistic over which you can re-establish any kind of legitimacy. There's no lowering the temperature anymore. Democracy depends upon the consent of the governed, and if you don't have it, you're either in a dictatorship or you're at war, because there is no fighting against authoritarianism without authoritarian means, there is no fighting a war without fighting a war. Whether or not you personally hate Republicans or don't want to talk to them, it doesn't matter now, this is so much more important than personal grudges. Republicans are the enemy. Period. It may be an unfortunate development, but Republicans would be the first to tell you: war is war, and when you're at war, you give no quarter. So no matter whether Biden says or even believes otherwise, war means the age of demonization is only just beginning, and you never treat the enemy by half-measures. If they fight this dirty, we now have to too. Whatever country you thought you were in, whatever norms you thought we could re-establish, that's all over. All options are on the table because the other side has put all options on the table for more than five years. Really and truly at this point, the future depends on Democratic leaders who are willing to exercise extraordinary, authoritarian, wartime emergency powers of the type that Lincoln and FDR did: if we get the White House, then there may be no choice at certain points but to rule by executive order, countermand the Supreme Court, arrest certain members of congress, and occasionally impose martial law and suspend writ of habeas corpus, warrantless wire tapping and rendition without trial. The truth still is that Republicans were always right that some of that is always justified in the name of preventing terrorism, but now, Republicans are the potential terrorists: there are 300 million guns that can be used on any streetcorner with just a simple squeeze of a trigger. So unfortunately, we have to suspect them as terrorists without any compunction or regret, and still, as Lincoln and FDR did, use all these powers with the end goal of putting democracy back in place. Because all this is exactly what Trump and Republicans would do if they felt compelled to. When we were still in the Obama era and there was at least some small chance of reconciliation, I was against anything even remotely resembling this, because the price tag of what any of this means is so unbelievably steep, but Trump even attempting to take the Presidency with clear illegitimacy, that's the redline from which you can't come back. You can't treat this as a joke or kindergarten taunts, because even if it's meant that way (and I doubt it), the precedent is so incredibly tactile for whomever comes next. So all that worry about caution and prudence is over now. War is war, and if Trump manages to hold on to power, well then..... ....... ...... .....

....I'm also going through a really bad breakup right now so maybe I'm displacing the chaos of my life onto politics.....

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Tom Perez has done as well as anybody could in a job that must be a living hell, but it is time to build the coalition of the future. Whomever replaces Biden has to have a capacity not just past Biden, but past Obama. We need someone with an FDR, Lincoln level capacity for leadership, who can literally take the extraordinary expanded powers of an imperial presidency on herself and resist the temptation to use it for any reason other than altruistically. God bless Vice-President elect Harris, she just hasn't given any indication that she has that level of leadership in her. And I'm sure many of us will disagree on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but she's a dogmatic socialist ideologue. I would not trust her with even a normal presidency. But Stacey Abrams has now come within a hair's breath of flipping Georgia. Whatever 'it' is, the potential shown by Lincoln and FDR, Mandela, Ben-Gurion, Nehru, that is what Stacey Abrams is beginning to show, and any policy disagreement any of us may have along the way may turn out to be minor compared to the ability to hold a world together through the conflict of a century.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Hot Take of the Afternoon: There is one way in which Republicans are absolutely right - it takes an antisocial ideology to understand antisocial people, and some people are just that misanthropic. For some people, the more out of our way the rest of us go in being supportive and charitable, the more some beneficiaries are going to absolutely loathe and resent the rest of us for it, because any form of generosity at all reminds them of their failures. Some people simply resent the very need for people to be generous to them, and just like so many libertarians, they believe that any kind of commitment to anyone but themselves is a surrender of pride and independence, which is of course self-fulfilling and also indicative that they care more about nursing their hatreds than they do alleviating the burdens of their lives.

....Am I talking about politics anymore?.....

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Modern American conservatives are obsessed by issues of pride. It isn't enough to have gun rights, it has to extend to AR-15's. It isn't enough to have freedom of worship, it has to be freedom to impose religious beliefs. It isn't enough to have free speech, it has to be free incitement. If their concerns were truly about freedom and survival, the extent of their demands for impositions on the rest of us would have limitations. But they have no limitations - and that's how you know these demands are about pride rather than efficacy or survival: it's the conservative equivalent of if liberals demanded 100% taxes and the abolition of churches.

And because they're obsessed by issues of pride, they can't not desperately crave intellectual acceptance from the people they loathe, because every time they don't get it, the pride turns into humiliation. Eric Hoffer put it best when he said "You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy." So for so many conservatives I know, the relationship between them and liberals has to be unequal, or else they feel they've lost. They behave toward liberals with mixture of hatred and contempt on the one hand, and bewilderment that they get hatred and contempt in return. They can't just have a relationship to liberals, they have to have the kind of relationship where every interaction is combat with them that always results in their victory, and the proper place for the rest of us is to simply accept their superiority over us. It's very similar to Russia's relationship to Europeans.

But then they wonder why they can't get complete acceptance from people they've literally told to fuck off every day for thirty years, and that feeds their resentments and their aggrieved sense of pride even moreso, which makes them double down on their rage against us every time they think of us because they pathologically need to be accepted by the very people they so hate, but why would people they so clearly hate ever have a reason to accept them? They end up feeling hated by people they go out of their way to hate, humiliated by people they go out of their way to humiliate, and persecuted by people they go out of their way to persecute.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Five things to remember:

1. Fascism is so far from our biggest worry. We're not in 1933, and every time shit gets hairy in world history it gets hairy in a way that's completely different from the way it got hairy the time before, all that you can predict is that once the safeties come off societies, something will fuck up and the world dissolves in chaos. 120 years ago, nobody anticipated the 2 world wars. What everybody anticipated was a retread of the French Revolution and Napoleon. In some ways, they got it in the Russian Revolution and Stalin, but however dangerous and deadly left-wing dictatorship turned out ot be, right-wing dictatorship turned out to be the deadliest thing of all, and no bourgeois person at the time saw it coming. Today, the bourgeois is generally as progressive as they used to be reactionary, and so whatever the new biggest murder threat is, it's going to be a very different threat from what we currently anticipate.... By 1905, all the world knew in the leadup to World War I was that the world was clearly spinning out of control, but they had no idea how.

2. If you're thinking of leaving the US particularly because of fascism or civil war (and this is as much self-advice as anything else), don't. If you're gonna leave, just leave because you just don't like it here. If you like it here, stay. If you have people you love here, they need you. If you have abilities that make you a desireable job commodity elsewhere, use it here because there are so many people here whose lives will be better for the way you use your talents, and you may in fact be the difference for them between life and death.

3. There's still no guarantee that America will ever truly become a dictatorship, and if America ever does turn truly authoritarian, I guarantee America eventually brings a dozen or more seemingly unassailable democracies along with it, one of which you may have moved to to avoid the gathering storm here. And even if America or elsewhere really does turn to a seemingly permanent dictatorship, unless a dictatorship is truly totalitarian like Stalin or Mao, and millions of us get arrested and shot every year for shit we've already said or written, it's honestly not that different from life already. If you actively resist the dictatorship, then yes, you have to be very very worried, but ultimately the same people prosper, the same people are discriminated against, the same institutions are the same as ever, it's just that there becomes certain subjects and people you begin to realize it becoming prudent to avoid. If dictatorship goes to war against another world power, then yes, that's truly hell on earth, but Putin's Russia is obviously a dictatorship, and it has not yet gone to war in any way that isn't similar to the wars US already conducts all the time.

4. If something like civil war is coming, it's unlikely to be 'total civil war. It's just civil violence happening in certain areas of the country, mostly rural standoffs. A war like that may then stretch to terrorism or crossfires on streetcorners. But unless the US goes to war with another major world power, life still goes on for most people as it did before. The rest of us then just live with the fear that tens of millions of Americans in forgotten neighborhoods have lived with their entire lives, that the instability is coming particularly for us, and billions of people around the world have never known a day when they don't know that fear. The only difference in your daily life that you're going to live with more fear. Fear that tragedy is coming particularly for you, and it well might, but it won't right away and it won't all at once. Fear is a part of life, and people who don't live with fear every day are very very lucky. If you've been lucky enough to not live with daily fear until now, well, now you're unlucky like the rest of the world, but except for your general emotional state, the essentials of your life are likely not to change for a long time.

5. Global warming is so much more dangerous than Republicans, and Republicans are their most dangerous not because of who they are, but because of how they enable global warming and the billions of deaths it may cause. If you want to know how America becomes as bad as Hitler's death camps, it's not by establishing a dictatorship. If global warming hits at its full force, the climate itself becomes the gas chamber and the crematorium, and this is not an effect that will visit itself particularly on the US. There is no outrunning global warming to a corner of the globe where the effects won't be felt. The effects will literally be everywhere, and no matter where you are, it is still potentially lethal.

Don't be pessimistic, don't be optimistic either. Be realistic, and be pragmatic, try to be sobered and humbled by the enormity of whatever comes, don't fool yourself with fool's optimism, but don't lose hope either. Life is chaotic and it's sometimes very very dangerous, but however grueling, it does go on, and there are consolations along the way, and you are almost guaranteed to see many many many more of them. Amen.