BERLIN, JERUSALEM AND THE MOON
Just look at the list of characters. Two are historical figures out of the tradition of radical Jewish intellectualism: the paradoxically mystical Marxist thinker, Walter Benjamin, and his fellow German, expressionist poet Else Lasker-Schuler. Then there’s Edie—a middle-aged, middle-class, hip Jewish feminist New Yorker not unlike TV’s Maude; and Izzie the K—a cross between Kafka and Lenny Bruce. Even Jacob the patriarch puts in an appearance.
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All these folks are absorbed in great and painful conflicts over their identities—a typically leftist/Jewish pastime, since leftist Jews are typically on the outs: too cosmopolitan for their religious tradition and too sectarian for their political environment. Edie can’t reconcile her feminism with a tradition that says that as a woman she doesn’t qualify to say kaddish, the memorial prayer, on behalf of her own beloved dead. Izzie makes bitter jokes about the assimilative seductions of the United States and his own love-hate relationship with Israel.
Berlin tells this story with a crucial change of emphasis. Where the Genesis Jacob fights aggressively, dominates his opponent, and demands his new name as a kind of ransom before he’ll let that opponent go, the Berlin Jacob struggles only to be free of his assailant and assumes his Israel identity only after he’s been overpowered. Conflated with the hapless Benjamin, this Jacob discovers his Judaism by running away from it.
In this context, Berlin comes off feeling like nothing so much as nostalgia. Pleasantly unpleasant. A haymishe but thoroughly regressive look at dilemmas past. Sure, Izzie’s riff describing his stomach-churning angst over Israel is tragically apt. But practically everything else, including the show’s basic intellectual stance, suggests a visit to somebody’s old consciousness-raising group.
