A genuine Jew's guide to the Austin Jewish Book Fair
A choosy chosen person's highlights from this week's festival
In the wake of the smash success of the Texas Book Festival, we here at A.V. Club Austin felt we should give equal time to this week’s 26th Annual Austin Jewish Book Fair, which gathers a relatively smaller but still fascinating group of writers and speakers to trade stories about what it means to be Jewish. Trouble is, we’re a primarily WASP-y lot here, with next to no idea of what it means to be Jewish outside of what we’ve gleaned from Yentl, stand-up comics, and episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm. So we contacted one of our favorite Jews—Mike Pace, frontman of Sub Pop indie-rockers Oxford Collapse and a recently transplanted Austinite—to tell us about some of the things he was excited about, for both himself and his chosen people.
My name is Michael Pace and I am a real live Jew living in Austin. What, you couldn’t tell? Perhaps it’s my Italian last name, though more likely it’s because my horns are hidden in a Jew-fro thick enough to rival Gene Shalit’s. And truth be told, I’m not a particularly observant member of the Tribe, but do I respect and somewhat admire the thousands of years of tradition passed down through the generations. I also really love my grandparents. Oh shit, I forgot to fast on Yom Kippur. Again.
Regardless, I’m schvitzing in excitement—which is what Jews do—over the Austin Jewish Book Fair. For local and transplanted Jews like myself (as well as the rest of you goyim), it’ll be an opportunity to listen, converse, nosh, kvetch, and engage with others on a variety of topics, Talmudic and otherwise. Over the course of eight crazy nights, a battery of rabbis, Judaic scholars, esteemed lecturers, serious journalists, and a guy from Heeb magazine will tackle topics ranging from Nazi hunting to the creation of Jewish homelands in the Middle East and on Long Island to growing up with the unfortunate surname of “Plotz.” It’s like Chanukah came early.
While I wasn’t raised in Levittown, I did grow up a few towns over, in another semi-affluent Long Island suburb where Jews ruled. There was nary a weekend between 1991 and 1993 where I wasn’t inappropriately clapping at the end of someone’s Torah portion, writing obscenities on someone’s sign-in board, or shaking my tuchas to Black Box and Kris Kross (inevitably followed by rocking an inflatable guitar to Van Halen’s “Right Now”) at some schlub’s bar mitzvah. David Kushner, who’ll be speaking as part of Tuesday’s “A Night Of History: The Rest Of The Story,” probably knows this terrain well. His new Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, And The Fight For Civil Rights In America's Legendary Suburb chronicles the post-WWII “white flight” to those first pre-fab suburbs along the North Shore of Long Island and the civil unrest that followed. Personally, I haven’t been to Levittown since I saw that Howard Stern movie in a dumpy theater there (and got a horrible case of food poisoning eating the traef at Blimpie’s beforehand), but I can attest that the area is still feeling the after-effects of that segregation. After all, there was exactly one black person in my high school.
There were no black kids at the Hebrew school I attended—just a bunch of obnoxious “jappy” kids, 98 percent of whom decided to end their Judaic education after their bar/bat mitzvahs. In fact, “Hebrew High” probably has the greatest dropout rate of any educational institution anywhere in the history of the world, something Slate editor David Plotz is probably well aware of. Plotz was inspired to pick up the Bible because he was bored to shit at his niece’s bat mitzvah service and wanted some reading material while the cantor droned on, and the result is his new Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, And Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word Of The Bible. Joining him at Thursday's "Lit Wit" night will be New Yorker editor (and actual New Yorker) Ben Greenman to read excerpts from Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish, a new collection of fiction from what is essentially the bible of hip Jewish humor, Heeb magazine.
The festivities come to a close Sunday night with “A Salute To Israel,” which sounds like something Itzhak Perlman should be playing. But it’s just Jerusalem Post columnist Saul Singer, who will discuss his book Start-Up Nation, chronicling the country’s rise as an economic power despite no natural resources, constant war and religious unrest, and general tsuris. Hey, did you know that if you’re a Jew under the age of 27, you can get a free trip to Israel? I didn’t learn about this until I was 28, alas. But I also had no urge to go to the Motherland until I discovered that I really like Middle Eastern cuisine, which was sometime last week. Though I must say, my grandmother makes matzoh balls from a secret recipe that are the size of bull testicles—and twice as delish. She also wears a gold pendant that says “21 PLUS,” and she thinks I’m the smartest, most handsome boy in the whole world. But I digress: Israel. It’s for serious.
So yeah, back to the book fair. Much like the youngest at the table during Pesach, it leaves me with four questions: Did they have to perpetuate stereotypes by kicking this thing off with a bagel breakfast? Will someone inevitably refer to Woody Allen as a “self-hating Jew,” much like my Hebrew teacher did? Will it come as a surprise to anyone that more than two of these writers live in Park Slope? Will secret Jew David Lee Roth make a surprise appearance to autograph copies of his 1995 autobiography, Crazy From The Heat? Only one way to find out why these nights are different from all other nights.
