THE AUSTRALIAN JEWISH NEWS – www.ajn.com.au
16 OUTLOOK
Friday, May 4, 2007
What’s in a Jewish baby’s name?
Many Israeli and Australian
Jewish parents abandon the
traditionally Jewish and biblical
in favour of modern and largely
rootless names for their
newborns.
VERY now and then I feel a
strange kind of envy while
scanning the birth notices in
this paper. The reason has to
do with certain names given to the
newborns. Names such as Sky, Justin,
Saskia, Liam and Teaghan can provoke this reaction. My envy has to do
with what such names might indicate
about the parents’ state of mind. You
need a certain confidence to call your
child Willow or Apple, a confidence of
the present and future, unhampered
by the weight of the past. It suggests a
total immersion in the culture and
fashion of now and of here. I envy the
implicit sense of freedom, the audaciousness of it.
Some of my friends took months
deciding how to name their child,
unable to commit for days or even
weeks after the baby had arrived. No
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KALEIDOSCOPE
JULIE SZEGO
such dilemmas for us. Sara was chosen
early on. She is named after my greatgrandmother who was murdered at
Auschwitz, but also, obviously, after
our biblical matriarch. In fact, the only
names in contention were biblical
names. How on earth do I explain this
powerful, uncompromising call? I’m
an agnostic, after all, fiercely secular
and relatively nonchalant about
tradition.
You need a certain
confidence to call your
child Willow or Apple, a
confidence of the
present and future,
unhampered by the
weight of the past.
An Orthodox cousin of mine –
another Sara, as it happens – named
her youngest child Elisheva, noting
that it alludes to the number seven.
The baby, she explained,“was born an
hour before Shabbat (the seventh
day), and an hour before Sukkot (festival of seven days), in the month of
Tishrei (the seventh month)”. The
Old Testament name sings to me; and
the methodology by which it was
chosen, a sharp contrast to the random quest for something exotic, on
which so many of us embark.
Names such as Rachel, David and
Isaac came first, as far as JudeoChristian civilisation is concerned.
They speak of origins, roots, constancy. For thousands of years, Jews
managed with only 150 biblical
names in circulation.
HE story of Jewish names is, of
course, a historical epic, with Jewish names competing and coexisting
with
others.
After
Emancipation, the Jewish name
became optional, and then Zionism
sought to wipe the slate clean entirely.
In doing so, they made a point of
reclaiming the Bible’s shady or underappreciated personalities: guerrilla
fighters (like Yochanan), tillers of the
earth (Boaz), rapists (Amnon) and the
raped (Tamar).
In the 1940s, the radical Zionist
Canaanite movement, eager to cultivate a new “Hebrew” identity, went
even further back and resurrected preIsraelite names. According to a Haifa
University psychologist, interviewed in
the Jerusalem Post 10 years ago, the
Canaanites won their greatest victory
in this arena. Some of the most popular Israeli names, such as Anat, Hagar,
Nimrod, come from Canaanite gods
or were attached to non-Jewish pagans
in the Old Testament. Adam – previously avoided because the biblical man
himself wasn’t a Jew – became common too.
This movement sought affirmation
in the distant past to lay down roots in
their new land. But contemporary
Israel looks away from the land and
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towards the future. Short, gender-neutral names, Hebrew but easily pronounceable in any language and
devoid of Jewish symbolism, abound:
Shir, Ben, Tom, Tal. A friend of mine in
Israel recently called her baby daughter
Roni. This trend has been interpreted
as representing a crisis of instability in
the Israeli psyche; people don’t know
where they’re going or where they
want to go.
You can understand this non-committal, keep-all-options-open philosophy. After all, who knows how the
story of modern Israel ends?
I don’t know where the narrative of
Jewish history ends either, but I do
know where it began. Simply picking a
name from the near-endless selection
available – regardless of origin, ethnicity, whatever – strikes me as a disavowal of something, even if a part of
me yearns to just go with the flow.
On the AJN website this week, Sydney’s Rabbi Ritchie Moss talked about
the significance of naming. “Kabbalah
teaches that parents are given temporary prophecy to choose the right
name for their child,” he advised.
As it happens – Sky or Saskia
notwithstanding – Joshua was still the
most popular name for Australian
Jewish babies last year, judging by the
birth notices in this paper. Noah and
Benjamin were up there too, and while
Rebecca and Sarah appeared to slide a
little, they’re still in the mix. I’m clearly
not the only one whose “prophecy”
leads to the past, back to the beginning, all over again.
Julie Szego is a columnist at the Age.
Her column appears monthly.
A brilliant example – of bad journalism
Fairfax Middle East
correspondent Ed O’Loughlin
is obviously a talented
journalist who brilliantly
distorts facts and substitutes
opinions for news.
He brilliantly marshals
carefully selected and
edited facts, attributions
to others of views he
obviously shares, and
loaded language.
RETURN from Zimbabwe
for Fairfax Middle East correspondent Ed O’Loughlin,
and the consequent changes
to the Age’s and Sydney Morning Herald’s Middle East coverage, illustrate
how talented he is.
O’Loughlin is a pre-eminent practitioner of “crypto-opinion journalism”. While ostensibly adhering, more
or less, to the rules of news reporting,
he brilliantly marshals carefully
selected and edited facts, attributions
to others of views he obviously shares,
and loaded language. He thus effectively leaves the non-knowledgeable
reader no choice but to agree with his
own views.
Thus, an April 23 report of fewer
than 300 words on a series of violent
incidents which left nine Palestinians
dead (at least five of whom were
armed combatants) contained no
fewer than four distortions, all skewed
against Israel.
O’Loughlin wrote, “Troops raided
the Jenin refugee camp, shooting
dead 17-year-old Bushra Wahash as
she looked through the window of
her home.” O’Loughlin omitted that
the shooting occurred as Israeli
troops were searching Wahash’s home
for her brother, who is a terrorist from
Islamic Jihad. Moreover, the soldiers
had previously called for all inside to
leave.
Also, a man was killed when Israel
targeted a car which was reported to
be a “civilian”, even though two other
passengers were “militants” and the
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MEDIA
MATTERS
TZVI FLEISCHER
car was “travelling near an area where
three rockets had earlier been
launched”. Unmentioned was that
Israel claimed the car’s occupants
were the rocket-launching team.
Using
language
seemingly
designed to portray Palestinian rockets as unimportant, three Israeli civilian victims of a rocket attack were
treated for “hysteria”, not shock, the
usual medical term.
Finally, O’Loughlin felt the need to
bring up, and distort, an unrelated
January 4 incident, writing that the
current violence was the worst “since
January, when four Palestinians were
killed by Israeli troops who opened
fire in a food market in ... Ramallah”.
In that incident, a firefight broke out
between Israelis and Palestinians during an attempted arrest raid.
ORE recently, O’Loughlin has
taken up the cudgels for Azmi
Bishara, the controversial
Israeli Arab Knesset member who
recently fled Israel facing charges over
allegedly giving intelligence to the
enemy during last year’s Second
Lebanon War. O’Loughlin initially
declared Bishara an opponent of
“Israel’s present status as a state in
which Jews enjoy special rights” (April
27). He then followed this with what
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was essentially an opinion piece (April
28) labelled as a news story, arguing
that Bishara’s prosecution is part of a
general campaign of persecution to
silence all those Arab Israelis who, like
Bishara, simply want to end supposed
discrimination.
O’Loughlin’s technique was familiar. He quoted, without other views,
anonymous members of Bishara’s
Balad Party,“many Israeli Arabs – and
some Jewish commentators” and
unnamed “human-rights groups and
Israeli Arab leaders”, claiming Bishara
was the victim of a larger campaign to
repress Israeli Arabs’ free speech.
O’Loughlin then adduced evidence to
support the existence of such a campaign, such as distorting admittedly
ugly and irresponsible statements by
the small far-right Yisrael Beitenu
Party, and a snippet of a reasonable
statement by the head of the Shin Bet
security service that the increasingly
radical stances of many Israel Arabs
represent a “strategic threat” to Israel.
He then treats the case as proven.
Meanwhile, he misrepresents the
dispute over Israeli Arab demands,
saying Bishara wants to end “Israel’s
legal status as an ethnically Jewish
State” while the whole campaign
against Bishara is an attempt to block
“recent Arab initiatives aimed at
ending legal and practical discrimination against non-Jewish citizens of
Israel”.
Actually, Bishara has gone well
beyond such formulations, which
many Israeli Arabs freely advocate all
the time without fear of legal consequences. According to Israeli Arab
television journalist Riad Ali,
“Bishara and his Balad Party abandoned the dream of egalitarian citizenship in favour of ... pan-Arabism.
They actively advocated for a strong,
solid Palestinian Arab identity
detached emotionally and intellectually from Israel – an identity that did
not tie in on even the most basic levels with [a] ‘state of all its
citizens’.”
Meanwhile, the recent “Arab initiatives” O’Loughlin mentions are
dominated by the “Future Vision of
the Palestinian Arabs in Israel”
drafted by a roof body of Israeli Arab
organisations. This has been controversial across the Israeli political
spectrum because it demands much
more than ensuring Arab civil rights
– it calls Israel a “colonialist” entity,
and calls for the Arab minority to
have both separatist autonomy to
live in the “Arab, Islamic and human
cultural space”, plus the right to collectively veto all national decisions.
I can’t exactly say it is good to
have O’Loughlin back writing about
the Middle East, but he does serve a
purpose. O’Loughlin is a brilliant
negative example – a perfect illustration of what is wrong with much of
contemporary journalism.
Tzvi Fleischer is editor of AIR, the
monthly magazine of the Australia/Israel
& Jewish Affairs Council.
His column appears monthly.