Catch the Jew: Tuvia Tenenbom on Israel, the Media, and Bad Jews, Part One

Tuvia Tenenbom appears good-humored and jovial, wearing a partially unbuttoned shirt and bright red glasses. When he speaks, the audience listens – expecting tales of laughter and cultural misunderstandings. And many of his stories do start out humorous as he delivers them in an almost nonchalant tone, often joking about his appearance – until these stories take a dark turn and you remember that he’s not talking about fiction.

Then, the passion and outrage in Tenenbom’s voice grows, keeping all eyes on him. When he relates particularly disturbing moments, his voice drops into an incredulous whisper, as though he’s sharing this story for the first time with friends. There’s no denying he’s a great storyteller and his book is no different. He writes the way he speaks – funny, off the cuff, and honest.

Tenenbom’s current book came about because he was invited to travel Germany and relate his experiences as a Jew of German descent. He found more than he bargained for, and a while later, his German editor asked for the same brutally honest and uncompromising look at Tenenbom’s own birthplace – Israel. So began seven months of the mind-boggling and the bizarre as Tenenbom traveled the Holy Land talking to everyone and anyone in order to simply find out ‘’what’s going on’’ and write his book, Catch the Jew.

To say Tenenbom met everyone is not much of an overstatement. From members of the Knesset to leaders of the Palestinian Authority – even President Shimon Peres – everyone got their screen time in this theater of the absurd.

Tenenbom is quick to note, and does so repeatedly, that everything he writes about has been recorded. His German editors (and more importantly, their legal team) wouldn’t allow the publication of the things he wrote without recorded proof.

But editors and lawyers and ruffled feathers are nothing compared to the white-knuckle adventures Tenenbom put himself through in the name of journalism. With his blonde hair and ambiguous accent, he doesn’t have difficulty passing for a German journalist by the name of Toby. As each conversation with Europeans and Arabs is inevitably prefaced with the qualifier, ‘’Are you Jewish?’’ gauging to see whether they can speak freely about racially questionable opinions – Tenenbom knows he must answer ‘’No’’ if he is to get anyone’s honest opinion. People watch what they say to Jews, but not to friendly Germans whom they assume to be allies – non-Jewish, non-Arabic speaking allies. This doesn’t just protect him, it affords him access to areas Jews cannot go, or areas they can go only once. And the things people say when they think no Jews are listening are truly revealing.

Besides unprecedented access to areas under control of the Palestinian Authority, Tenenbom also has the advantage of speaking Arabic, though he pretends not to, lest his hosts censor what they say in his presence. This gives us, the readers, a remarkable view of what happens behind the scenes of so-called demonstrations, for example, and what goes on in the minds of the people in charge of the Palestinian Authority, among others – things that bleeding heart Europeans who travel to Israel don’t see or understand.

But the flip side of being an infiltrator is the danger of being found out. More than once, Tenenbom has had to be quick on his feet and rely on his understanding of Arab culture or on his host’s good humor to keep from being discovered. This is where his experience and training as a dramatist comes in handy.

I read his book quickly. Like a gruesome image I couldn’t look away from, I read the book at every free moment I had. Like a masochist, I read more and more about European schemes in the Holy Land, the ingenious tricks Palestinians employ to fool the media, how non-governmental organizations (“NGOs”) use their good names to stoke the flames of anti-Semitism, and oh, the tremendous amount of money that flows through it all!

Tenenbom relates everything he sees to the reader, from the trivial to the tragic – from huge declarations that seem to doom the fate of the Jewish people, to small moments of poignancy and heartbreak, such as when he notices the way Israelis turn their radios on every hour to see whether their country is still around. He has no obligation to any editor, he says.

‘’I have one obligation – to the reader. That I present to you what I saw. And I can prove it. I recorded it. And that’s the idea.’’

His approach to journalism shouldn’t be unusual, but it is. At a time when international headlines declare ‘’rocks’’ and ‘’attacks’’ responsible for vague, almost dehumanized Israeli deaths – with no mention of the actual perpetrators – a journalist reporting things as he sees them, no more no less, is, to paraphrase the saying, a revolutionary act.

‘’Look, I came to Israel, I stayed there almost seven months. The findings that I have… the journalists who were stationed there for years and years should have reported it before me… How come they couldn’t find it? There’s only one reason they couldn’t find it. They didn’t want to find it… They came there with an agenda and this agenda is against Israel… and if you come with this agenda, that’s what you’re going to find.’’

Instead, journalists should throw their own prejudices out, Tenenbom argues. He relates a particular incident to illustrate his point. After a revealing conversation with a member of an NGO, he is told, ‘’‘Toby, now you have everything. You know what to put in and what to take out.’ And that’s the way it works.’’ As a ‘’good German,’’ Tenenbom is expected to help the cause by removing anything he sees or hears that is less than ideal.

‘’We have forgotten what it means to be journalists. We have forgotten that journalism means we report it even if we don’t like it. You know, there are times when I clearly don’t like what I report. I really wish, very very much, that it would’ve been different but this is my job.’’

Tenenbom’s travels and conversations, in his journey to discover the many attitudes of Israel, seem to have penetrated the very depths of human cowardice and hatred. He encounters doctors inventing diseases, imams chanting for death, Europeans getting paid to hate Jews – but few things are as despicable as, for example, a Jewish tour guide skewing a trip to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, to fit his own political agenda. Amazingly, Tenenbom remains upbeat throughout everything, his tone only rarely moving toward the disappointed or bewildered.

Catch the Jew is vignettes, anecdotes, interviews, site visits, and so much more. It is insight into people’s psychology and a lesson in persistently asking questions, interspersed with the occasional suggestive joke.

Catch the Jew is not just a book about Israel. It is a book about the very imperfect but fascinating people who live there, the Europeans who come to ‘’help,’’ and the many lies surrounding the region. It is full of contradictions, surreal experiences, and situations so absurd they could only have come from the Middle East.

It is not an optimistic book, though readers are free to draw different conclusions from Tenenbom’s experiences. I, for one, try to remain an optimist but, as Tenenbom says to our eager audience, ‘’If I want to die and you want to kill me, what happens when we meet?’’

Part Two of this article will appear in the next issue of Writer’s Bloc.

Tuvia Tenenbom is the author of Catch the Jew and I Sleep in Hitler’s Room. You can find both books at Amazon.com. For more info on Catch the Jew, visit CatchtheJew.net.

Tatiana Sundeyeva-Orozco has gotten into the terrible habit of thinking too much about everything. She enjoys fantasizing about traveling, compulsively buying literature, laughing at her own puns, and consuming anything (and everything) that can be found in a bakery. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley where she got a degree in English with a minor in Italian. She can be found celebrating awesome female friendships on LadyBromance.com.

By Tatiana Sundeyeva-Orozco