Special events: Desecrations, screenings, nominations, panels, publications.

By Jeff Sharlet

The Revealer is on temporary hiatus, but we’ll be back soon with some new features and contributors. Meantime, I want to announce some upcoming local events here in NYC and some new books by friends of The Revealer.

Nobody hates God more than novelist Melvin Jules Bukiet, who’ll be reading at the Cornelia Street Cafe, a legendary restaurant and jazz club in the West Village, on Thursday, February 22, at 6 pm. Melvin claims that when German Chancellor Helmut Kohl asked him to inscribe a copy of Melvin’s Holocaust comedy, After, he signed it with the number tattooed on his father’s arm. Here’s what critic Anders Zabotinsky has to say about this unpleasant character: “The thing about Bukiet’s ‘work’ is that no one wins, not the characters and not the readers who are inevitably betrayed by the author’s relentless bad taste and a cynicism so pervasive you could swim — make that drown — in it… there are too many other more humane, more human writers who are capable of delivering a smidgen of hope for a reader’s $23.95, and they also need a buck, probably more than him (the guy teaches, though the idea that anyone would trust him with their young is a scandal) and he owns a bar (the drinks are probably watered) and he lives in a big house that he doesn’t deserve — so fuck him.”

I think Zabotinsky is unfair. Melvin’s is a deeply human sensibility. Consider his “Immodest Proposal” for Berlin’s Holocaust memorial by architect Peter Eisenman:

I suggest that a symbolic recreation of the Shoah be enacted, perhaps something along the lines of the Passion Play at Oberammergau, or call it performance art. Each year a Jew should be sacrificed on the altar of Mr. Eisenman’s elegant plaza.

Before rejecting this notion as morbid or preposterous, consider that the avowed purpose of such memorials and museums is to foster “memory.” Indeed, the Berlin project originally included a “House of Remembrance.” Memory is the mantra of all such institutions. Yet memory is only the vestige of experience, which means that only those who were actually there, in the camps, on either side of the barbed wire, can actually, literally, remember. For the rest of us, “remembering” the Holocaust is really an act of the imagination. By ritually killing a Jew, we can share the experience.

Such a sacrifice might seem horrifying, but the benefits clearly outweigh minor moral considerations. The active experience of viewing the sacrifice will subsequently create genuine memories, which will then be reflected upon by generation after generation of genuine witnesses. No more will my father have to lament that people can never understand. From now on, everyone will understand and, yes, remember. Over the long term, the concrete stelae of the Berlin memorial may prove as transitory as the wooden barracks at Auschwitz, but the infinitely greater treasure of memory will remain intact.

…[P]erhaps a random German could be chosen in a similar fashion to administer the injection. Perhaps that German could then be tried and executed. One could go on and on. One could debate the question for another decade. The possibilities are endless. That’s just the point. Human possibilities are endless.

Jabotinsky will be attending the reading, and so will I, since Melvin invited me to read with him. (I’m not Zabotinsky.) Thursday, Feb 22, 6 pm, at the Cornelia St. Cafe. Melvin will speak on the Jews. I will address the Christians. Let’s hope Zabotinsky doesn’t burn the joint down.

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The Center for Religion and Media is hosting two documentary screenings to be followed by discussions with the filmmakers:

Friday/ March 2/ 3:00-5:00pm
King Juan Carlos Center, 53 Washington Square South

With God on Our Side: George W. Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right (David Van Taylor and Calvin Skaggs, 1996, 100 min.)

An in-depth look at President Bush’s connection with evangelical Christianity.

A conversation between filmmaker David Van Taylor and journalist Jeff Sharlet will follow the screening.

Friday/ March 9/ 4:00-6:00pm
Cantor Film Center, 36 East 8th Street
Amongst White Clouds (dir: Edward Burger, 2005, 86 min.)

A journey into the hidden tradition of China’s Buddhist hermit monks living in scattered retreats dotting China’s Zhongnan Mountain range raises questions about their former marginalization, and current rediscovery, as religious practices revive in the People’s Republic.

A discussion between filmmaker Edward Burger and Angela Zito (CRM) will follow the screening.

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On the subject of documentaries: I’m thrilled to note that Jesus Camp, by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, is up for an Oscar. Back when the film first came out, I wrote this: “Jesus Camp is a film of bleak beauty, to borrow a phrase from the great photographer Danny Lyon, and like Lyon’s work, Jesus Camp is both unsentimental and heartbreaking, harrowing and absurd at the same time. It’s a movie about the Christian Right and that movement’s political ambitions, but it’s also a story about kids and what they believe and how they absorb the beliefs of the adults around them. Jesus Camp transcends its moment even as it reports on it with precision.” Rachel and Heidi were kind enough to come for a screening and discussion with the Center for Religion and Media last fall. I’d hoped to run a proper review/essay on the film at the time, but, well, I didn’t. By Oscar-time, though, I think we’ll have two.

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I’ll be joining four other Jewish journalists for a panel discussion, “Jewish Encounters With the Christian Right,” sponsored by Makor and the 92nd St. Y., on Wed., March 14, a 7 pm. The panelists include four writers with new or recent books, Eyal Press (Absolute Convictions), Zev Chafets (A Match Made in Heaven), Michelle Goldberg (Kingdom Coming), Lauren Sandler (Righteous) and me.

Date & Time: Wed, Mar 14, 2007, 7:00pm
Location: Steinhardt Building, 35 West 67th Street, NYC
Tickets are $15, $12 if you buy them online.

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New Books: Revealer contributor Michael Lesy publishes “Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties with W.W. Norton this month. Don’t let the title fool you — presented as popular history, Murder City is, like all of Michael’s work, from Wisconsin Death Trip to Angel’s World, as much about the medium as the message, a brilliant and subtly experimental inquiry about how to tell stories with pictures and words.

Darcey Steinke’s memoir of faith, “Easter Everywhere is NOT out this month, but I thought it was, and since I already plugged in the URL, I’m leaving it so you can order yours now. “Memoir of faith” sound kind of soggy? Here’s what The Revealer noted one critic said about her last novel, Milk:” Mary, an unstable mystic, masturbates with holy ardor, turning a prayer — ‘Come, Lord Jesus, have mercy on me’ — into a lascivious incantation. Walter, a left-wing Episcopal priest who has been demoted to an outer-borough church for coming on to a teenager at Manhattan’s Church of the Heavenly Rest, still desires boys; he spends his nights trolling gay bars and his days visiting Web sites ‘for theologically minded adherents of S-and-M.'” Virginia Heffernan in The NYTimes on Darcey Steinke’s new novel, Milk, “a furtive little book, a kinky Christian fable about three Brooklyn outcasts obsessed with God and sex.”

Last but not least–and actually published this month–Sara Miles’ “Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion. Miles sent me galleys for this months ago, thinking I might like it. I was certain I wouldn’t. It’s about Miles’ life as a cook, and I don’t like books about cooking, and about her conversion to Christianity, and conversion stories are usually more interesting as data than as narrative, and about Miles’ leftist Christian faith, and, much as I admire such faith, it’s usually too earnest for prose. I was the worst possible audience for this book — and I thought it was beautiful. The Revealer will be publishing more on it — or possibly an excerpt — soon.