Star Power
Public displays of Jewishness
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When the time comes, every parent has to teach their kids about the birds, the bees, and Buzzcut: a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer, strategist, and brand new man Zander Abranowicz.
My essay “Séance for the Ghost Bird” is included in the Are.na Annual 2023, the yearly journal of the popular digital platform — my favorite place on the internet. It chronicles the conception and development of “The Thing with Feathers,” an essay about the possibly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker published in the July 2022 edition of Buzzcut. To complement the essay, I created this Are.na channel with images, files, and ephemera, plus my annotations. To learn more about the Annual, read editor Meg Miller’s lovely introduction here. Edition of 1,000, available for purchase here.
Uncompensated Endorsement
A paean to what moves me
Star Power
In 2006 I was a 14-year-old materialist-in-training leafing through GQ when I found myself face-to-face with the actor Jeremy Piven in an advertisement for Gap. He was modeling one of the brand’s trademark cotton t-shirts, sleeve bunched at the shoulder á la Brando. Contrasting against the white fabric was a Star of David necklace. It was this detail that caught my eye.
Seeing that symbol served by a major American brand in a major American magazine shouldn’t have felt so radical, but for a teen wrestling with manhood one year past his bar mitzvah, it was. Here was a different shade of Jewish masculinity from the bookish one I’d internalized, the one that taught me to survive through smarts. That was still there — and still vital — but with new depths: vigor, prowess, muscle, sex. The ad meant the world to me. It still does.
I kept track of “alpha” Jewish role models from an early age, as I imagine many of my fellow tribesmen did. It started with the story of Hanukkah and its historic protagonist: the guerrilla-priest Judah Maccabee. It came close to home with stories and faded photographs of my grandfather, Arthur Raisfeld, who fought Nazis alongside other Bronx and Brooklyn boys as part of the 100th Division of Patch's Seventh Army in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany. It continued with defenders of the Jewish state, like the heroes of the 1976 raid on Entebbe (including its one Israeli casualty, Yonatan Netanyahu, brother of Benjamin). And it took on a lighter edge with the brilliant and subversive comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. Each of these figures helped me create my own counter-narrative to the attributes of victimhood ascribed to Jews, consciously and subconsciously, in our culture.
Meanwhile, I started noting cultural cameos of the Star of David, also called Magen David. Every time it appears, it’s a small thrill. There’s Paul Newman filming Exodus in Israel in 1960; the young English girl photographed by Jamie Hawkesworth in his wonderful book The British Isles; Louis Armstrong during a recording session — he apparently wore one to honor his childhood neighbors; Oliver in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, who lets a gold star peek out seductively from his oxford button-down. Each of these complicated my lingering belief that the Star of David necklace was a trapping of suburban Jewry, our imitation of the crucifix, with as much authenticity as the dinky plastic menorahs you see obligatorily placed next to more elaborate Christmas decorations in schools and stores during the holidays.
In 2022, 16 years after I saw Piven in that iconic campaign, the stars finally aligned for me to buy a necklace like his: a simple sterling silver chain and pendant from the brand Miansai. It was the first I’d found that met my aesthetic requirements and budget. Judaica Standard Time, creator of gloopy menorahs, seder plates, and apparel, makes a beautifully crude version in sterling silver and 14K gold, but priced at $600 and $1,800 respectively, I was a few shekels short. The options from Tiffany were too blingy, and skewed feminine. Miansai’s was lightweight, quiet, affordable, and classic. Haunted by Scarface and Johnny Depp in Sauvage ads, I never thought I’d become a necklace guy, but it’s now an inseparable part of my person.
Donning this simple chain and symbol is one of a few subtle gestures I’ve adopted in recent years to display the Semitic slice of my identity more openly. We host Passover seders in our backyard with friends of all persuasions. I write about ancient Jewish texts in this newsletter. At least once a month we light candles and save a good bottle of red for Shabbat. I wear my Ebbets Field “Hebrew Orphan Asylum” hat while tossing a baseball in the park, a recreation of a 1938 ballcap featuring a prominent Star of David stitched in white on navy broadcloth.
These public displays of Jewishness assumed new urgency after the 2018 Tree of Life massacre, in which 11 worshippers, mostly elderly, were executed at their synagogue in the historically Jewish Squirrel Hill neighborhood in Pittsburgh. It was the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. My grandmother’s family were Squirrel Hill people, and if Tree of Life brought the war home, subsequent events suggest it has just begun.
2021 saw antisemitic incidents reach a 42-year high in the United States — the most in a single year since the Anti Defamation League started tracking them in 1979. Despite being only 2.4 percent of the U.S. population, Jews absorb 58 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes. Pro-Israel students on college campuses are routinely subject to harassment and exclusion. And of course, the artist Ye has recently taken to airing antisemitic vitriol that would make even Louis Farrakhan blush. In New York, the bulk of antisemitic attacks are directed at the Orthodox community, whose religious garb makes them unmistakable. Like those forced to wear the Star of David on their sleeves in Nazi Germany and its territories, they’re visible targets.
These conditions have also served as a stinging reminder of the importance of Israel’s survival and security. (There's a saying among Jews: always know where your passport is.) The Star of David necklace doesn’t necessarily signify support for Zionism — the movement for Jewish national self-determination in our ancient homeland in Palestine — but this is a nuance ignored as readily as the notion that one can support Israel’s right to exist while remaining critical of some of its policies. While the Star possesses a terrestrial and political significance to me, it can just as authentically symbolize a purely spiritual or cultural bond to someone else.
It’s often observed that antisemitism emerges in dying civilizations. If that’s true, the recent surge emphasizes the present struggles of the American project, including staggering income inequality, election denialism, political violence, environmental degradation, racial animus, and a climate of mutual suspicion and demonization. If Jews are indeed the canary in the civilizational coal mine, then I suppose securing our safety and dignity is a measure to sustain America altogether. Our fates are intertwined. If we disappear, democracy does too.
In this spirit of power, sanctuary, and self-defense, the Star of David hangs inches from my heart, day and night. If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
Something You Should Know
A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver
Khakis were introduced into the preppy uniform when GIs, for whom the trousers were standard issue, wore them on college campuses after returning from World War II
You hooked us all on this one Z. Warren is shopping for a necklace, I may start wearing my mother’s star on more than just holidays and Zach has an outline tattoo of Israel—which worried me as he traveled through Europe.
Excellent piece Xander!