Madame Prime Minister, Your Hijab is Askew

JAR asked me the other night if I feel stifled in Jerusalem, where "there's no culture," as opposed to Tel Aviv. I responded that I don't really need "high" culture per se (I was raised mostly in that bastion of avant-gardism, suburban St. Louis) and that Jerusalem provides me precisely what I most lacked as a child: a rich intellectual culture.

That being said, Jerusalem's traffic jams and endless uphill climbs are not my only pet peeves; I also struggle as a Liberal (that's of the Lockean, post-Enlightenment variety, not the draft card/bra-burning, Karl Rove-pidgeon-holing type [though I'm also one of those]) in a city that with some regularity shows signs that more than the extent walls of the Old City are from the Middle Ages.

A certain two-time former counselor of mine told me shortly before the recent municipal elections that a party he supported - התעוררות (awakening) - consisting of six relatively youthful candidates (in contrast, I suppose, to the three plutocrats running for mayor) were told that their campaign posters, featuring pictures of their three female candidates, could not be posted on buses (it was unclear, according to aforementioned 2x former counselor of mine, if this was the policy of the bus company, אגד, or of the city itself) because there is a policy not to put women's faces on buses. Considering that the largest political bloc in the country (at least until the election), the sort-of-centrist Kadimah, is running a woman as their candidate for Prime Minister (after said woman, Tzipi Livni, could not put together a governing coalition), and that political advertisements with the candidate's picture (or a cartoon version of that picture) are omnipresent, this could be big news.

A few days later, I saw a woman's face on the side of a bus, so I dismissed the rumor, but now it seems like maybe it's a little more complicated than either my former counselor or I thought. Because this morning Ha'aretz reports that Livni has had problems with her billboards in Jerusalem being defaced.

Not to open a Pandora's can of worms (yes, I just mixed metaphors) but I'll restate: A significant problem with the notion of Jewish peoplehood is that the polarization and crystallization of the culture wars make me feel like I have more in common with secular liberals all over the world than religious fanatics - in Israel and elsewhere - who make my skin crawl. To put it glibly - I am not sure how cultures handled the disappearance of common enemies (fascists, Lenin-Stalinists) in the past - but we clearly have not achieved that. And it is still not clear to me, seven years after what was to be a Pearl Harbor moment in the clash between Jihadism and America, if the enemy is monolothic enough and scary enough to unite us behind a common approach to defeating that enemy.