|  | A WEEKLY LETTER FROM OUR EDITOR-IN-CHIEF |
|  | | Today: Three columns for the price (free!) of one.
Next week: Since Friday is Rosh Hashanah, I’ll be back in your inbox on Sunday with a special pre-10/7 edition of Looking Forward |
| Was it a memory or was it a mirage? Shaanan Streett, the Israeli hip-hop artist, wasn’t sure.
He was a soldier in Gaza that first day of November in 1991. But it was so long ago. Not in terms of time — three decades is a heartbeat in the history of the Holy Land — but trauma: Before the Israel-Hamas wars. Before, also, Oslo and Camp David. Before Netanya and Jenin, before Yigal Amir and Baruch Goldstein; before, way before, Oct. 7.
“So little has changed for the better, and so much has changed for the worse, that I wasn’t even sure that my memory was correct,” Streett said as he shared the story on our new podcast, Make Art Not War.
Nov. 1, 1991, was four years into the First Intifada, or Palestinian uprising. Every day, Streett said, Gaza residents threw stones and bottles at him and other members of the Israel Defense Forces as they patrolled the streets. Sometimes, molotov cocktails. Once, in an alleyway at night, he said, “somebody pushed a refrigerator from the roof and it fell about a meter behind me, but I kept walking.”
Nov. 1, 1991, was also two days into the Madrid peace conference. The television showed Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians and Syrians sitting together. And in Gaza, according to Streett’s fading memory, residents threw not stones or bottles but flowers and rice and olive branches.
“Am I sane? Did this day exist?” he asked. “Because if it did, why isn't it at all in collective memory?”
Wikipedia, he noted, records “every terror attack that happened, and it's good that we know it; I don't want to forget it. But if there were opposite things, why are those lost in our collective memory? Why can't we remember and build on the good things that happened, the hopeful things that happened? Why can't we bite the bait of peace? Why is it always us biting the bait of war?” |
|  | The Israeli hip-hop artist Shaanan Streett (top) is the first guest on Make Art Not War, a new podcast hosted by Libby Lenkinski (bottom). (Tamar Lazaros/Laba Media House) |
| Streett, 53, is the longtime lead singer of Hadag Nahash and featured in today’s launch episode of Make Art Not War, a show hosted by Libby Lenkinski, an Israeli-American focused on how art can promote peace. The podcast, which the Forward is producing in conjunction with Libby’s new organization, Albi, is straightforward yet profound: conversations with 10 Jewish and Palestinian creatives working in Israel about their art and their lives in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
Future guests include Mira Awad, the Palestinian singer who once represented Israel at Eurovision; the writer Etgar Keret; comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi; the street artist Addam Yekutieli, aka Know Hope; Neta Weiner and Samira Saraya of the Jewish-Arabic hip-hop ensemble System Ali; and Ohad Naharin, the former director of the dance troupe Batsheva.
Libby asks her guests to reflect on a quote from Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent: “The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation.” Streett said it reminded him of another quote, by Emma Goldman, that Hadag Nahash had used in a song: “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.”
“You know, creative people, they're thinking about the future, even if they don't realize it,” he explained. “They're being optimistic somehow, even if the creation itself is not very optimistic. If it's sad, if you're writing a sad song — if you're writing a sad poem, whatever — the fact that you're writing it, there's something happy in that. There's something optimistic in that.”
After Oct. 7, Streett and Hadag Nahash gave free concerts for survivors from the Nova festival, evacuees from the destroyed kibbutzim in the south and the threatened communities near the Lebanon border, deployed soldiers and others. For months, he kept a journal, but didn’t write any songs.
And then “after like three or four months,” he said, “I just couldn’t stop writing songs.”
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| “The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation.” |
| – Jonathan Larson, playwright, Rent |
| One of Streett’s new songs is called “Charbu Darbu” — Hebrew for “Connect and talk,” but also a pun on the post-Oct. 7 Israeli hit “Harbu Darbu” — “have war with” by Ness & Stilla. Another is “Zayin b’Oktobe,” Hebrew for the date of the Hamas attack, and also a pun on, well, the penis. (Or, as Libby puts it in the podcast, “a dude’s downstairs parts.” Nice.) The song about that day in Gaza in 1991 is called “Waltz with Shaanan,” a nod to the legendary 2008 Israeli animated film Waltz with Bashir, which is about post-traumatic stress among soldiers who fought in the 1982 Lebanon War.
Streett’s song recounts the horror of the first intifada — “a 5-year-old boy killed with a bullet meant for his feet,” a commander’s teeth knocked out by a rock, that refrigerator thrown from a rooftop. And then, as he puts it, “a story you haven’t heard before.” |
| Because the same streets where we saw protests and arrests Suddenly filled with a sea of celebration and shouts of happiness The same hands that stoned us in past circumstances This time threw rice, candy, and olive branches
Uniformed soldiers, in a cheering crowd on the main street We didn’t know what to think, we didn’t want to agitate But it happened, and I was there, the moment when a message, distinct and clear Was supposed to be sent, but it never arrived, it’s not here |
| “Waltz with Shannan” grew out of an encounter Streett had with the top generals of the IDF. He’d been invited to perform a few songs for them and their wives on a Friday in Jerusalem. First, he asked about his muddy memory, figuring “these guys were in the army forever” and might know whether Palestinians indeed gave soldiers flowers that day.
One said that he, too, had been in Gaza, and remembered “people running up to my Jeep and sticking olive branches into the Jeep,” Streett told Libby. Another general said he’d been on duty in the occupied West Bank, and “it happened there, too.” A third said he had a roll of black-and-white film documenting similar scenes.
When Street headed to his car after a post-show beer in the green room, the IDF chief of staff was waiting for him, along with his wife and two bodyguards. “He says, you know, you need to write a song about this story,” Streett recalled. “And you should call it, ‘Waltz with Shaanan.’ So I did. You know, I'm a soldier, I do what the general tells me.”
The song actually came out in September 2023, but it took on new life after Oct. 7.
“I think the most moving responses that I got were from soldiers in Gaza in this war,” Streett said on the podcast. “Even they feel like I understand them, even though it's 100 times worse now. Our guys in Gaza now, you know, what they're going to have to deal with is a hundred times worse than what my generation had to deal with. But still they feel that somebody understands them.”
That understanding, Libby responds, is one of the things we know art can do. In wartime — and all the time. |
| | Shabbat Shalom! Thanks to Samuel Eli Shepherd for contributing research and other things to this newsletter, and Adam Langer and Samuel Breslow for editing it. |
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| | | | WHY WON’T KAMALA HARRIS TALK ABOUT HER BRISKET? |
| There are a lot of big, important questions looming over this historical presidential campaign. Abortion. Immigration. Israel. Democracy. But before the November election come the Jewish holidays. And I suspect I’m not the only one wondering: What’s Vice President Kamala Harris’ brisket recipe?
Reader, I’ve been trying to find out ever since her Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff, invoked it in his Democratic National Convention speech: “She makes a mean brisket for Passover that brings me right back to my grandmother’s apartment in Brooklyn,” he said. “You know, the one with the plastic-covered couches.” |
|  | My mouth was watering. Next morning, I sent a barrage of text messages. To the Harris campaign’s Jewish liaison. To Emhoff’s spokesfolk. To the head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, Halie Sofer, who famously accompanied Harris and Emhoff on a trip to Israel. To a Chicago macher who is a major Democratic fundraiser.
I got back bubkes. (Not babkas, the bread of chocolaty deliciousness; bubkes, Yiddish for “nada.”)
It’s not like Harris is shy about her love of cooking. Back when she first ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, her campaign produced a whole “Cooking with Kamala” YouTube series that has gotten new life this summer. She made “monster cookies” with a teenager in Iowa and dosas with the actress Mindy Kaling. She cooked with celebrity chef Tom Collicchio and José Andrés of World Central Kitchen.
She has made fun of Senator Mark Warner’s tuna melts and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz’s “white people tacos” (which may be the same thing). She apparently snuck out of debate prep to shop for spices. There is a whole TikTok channel devoted to Kamala talking about food.
Just not about the brisket.
I am not prone to conspiracy theories, and certainly not accusing anyone of antisemitism. But it does feel like a conspicuous absence. Emhoff is everywhere, talking about how Harris has helped him reconnect with his Jewishness, partly via this brisket, and yet we have no idea if she slices thin or thick, uses tomato-based sauce or more brown gravy, sears first, uses a slow-cooker, has one of those crazy recipes involving Coca-Cola.
I tried the Chicago macher again. “That’s a hard assignment,” he texted back. “State secret.”
After Padma Lakshmi, the author and former host of Top Chef, wrote in The New York Timesabout how Harris’ strengths as a cook relate to her strengths as a leader, I tried the campaign again. The Emhoff people I’d been dealing with passed me over to Ernesto Apreza, the vice president’s press secretary. He called me right back — to say no.
“A lot of times these recipes are things that are very personal to the vice president,” Apreza told me, mentioning something about passing them on to Emhoff’s children, Cole and Ella.
Forget the recipe, I said. How about just a little backstory? When did she start making the brisket, who taught her, where does the recipe come from, does she only make it on Passover or also for, say, Rosh Hashanah?
I’m still waiting to hear back. In the meantime, I’ll be making the brisket I’ve been making for the last 20 years — a recipe from my sister’s husband’s late mother, Carol. It’s not even really a recipe, but I’m certainly not shy about sharing it: |
| Salt and pepper the meat and sear it on the stove. Dump equal parts cranberry sauce, pizza sauce and onion soup mix (like one, two or three cans, jars and packets of each) on top, cover with foil, and cook low and slow for at least two hours but much more as desired.
Ideally, make this days ahead, and store sauce and meat separately in the fridge. Before serving, slice the meat while cold. Remove fat from the top of the sauce and reduce it on the stove, then pour over the sliced meat and reheat as needed. |
| | | | Tashlich is one of my favorite rituals for this time of year. On the afternoon of the first day of Rosh Hashanah, my synagogue gathers in a park with a creek, sings a few songs and symbolically tosses bread into the water. The bread is meant to symbolize our sins, which we cast off, repentant and renewed for the year ahead.
This week, I did something that felt like a twist on tashlich, while at a retreat in the Berkshires run by Canvas, which helps fund our coverage of arts and culture (thank you!). Rabbi Kendell Pinkney, a playwright who also runs The Workshop, a fellowship for Jews of Color, led the group in a pre-High Holiday activity I just had to share.
First, Rabbi Pinkney taught us a text from the Gemara about the origins of the word shamayim, Hebrew for heavens. One rabbi saw it as a combination of the words for fire (aysh) and water (mayim), representing the idea that from fire and water God created the world. So Rabbi Pinkney gave us each two pieces of special paper — one that quickly disappears in water, one that is consumed by flame in a flash.
Both fire and water can be both nourishing and destructive, he pointed out. Then he encouraged us to think of one thing we want to cultivate in the coming year, and one we want to cleanse ourselves of, leaving it up to each of us to decide which thing to write on which paper. That night, we burned the flash paper and, as depicted below, watched some of our words dissolve in a pool of water. |
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