The week the world fell apart |
I had thought I was going to be on vacation (staycation but whatever) at the quiet time of the year, during which nothing major was going to happen, generally or Jewishly.
I think you can see where this is going.
No sooner did I log off than the Hanukkah from hell began: the Bondi Beach anti-Jewish massacre in Australia, and then the killing of actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner and wife, photographer Michele Singer Reiner. There was the shooting at Brown University, and, not long after, the violent death of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The first-mentioned of these, horrific in that way where it can become all you think about (and it did; I may have been on vacation from professionally opining on Jewish matters but I was aware, I was thinking of little else while going to my kid’s Hanukkah recital), coloured my impression of the rest. The blips of social media I took in were full of plausible-sounding rumours: that the Brown professor whose class was attacked had some kind of Israel or Jewish studies connection, and that Nuno Loureiro, the murdered MIT professor, was a Jew.
And it was all on my own that I wondered whether the death on the first night of Hanukkah of someone as famously Jewish (liberal and Jewish) as Rob Reiner was about, well, you know.
I may not remember much that I learned in my 10,000 years of schooling (that’s Dr. Bovy to you, technically; I would never request anyone call me this), but I have a deep memory where television history’s concerned, including of shows that were before my time. Odd, perhaps, for a millennial, but I know as if it were family lore that Carl Reiner,........