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A step up By Yaron Frid Tags: Jewish World, Edna Nahshon There are many sides to shoes. If you thought they were just practical, or maybe even fashionable, accessories for your feet - think again. Prof. Edna Nahshon, editor of "Jews and Shoes" (Berg Publishers), wants to set the "Jewish memory closet" straight, she says, and that involves granting the shoe special status. A graduate of Tel Aviv University and New York University, Nahshon is a senior associate at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and at the Center of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Oxford University. She has been living "for many years, the exact number is not important," in the city where Carrie Bradshaw of "Sex and the City" fame, idolized Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo and the like, becoming the high priestess of the shoe religion. Imelda Marcos had 3,000 pairs of shoes, but "most of us today don't even count the pairs we have," says Nahshon, in a phone conversation. "But there was a time when a person had only one or two pairs, and so the shoe carried symbolic weight, with much of the wearer's personality becoming invested in it. In fact the shoe was identified with its owner. This is the single item of clothing that maintains its shape when it isn't worn. F Advertisement or the religious and ultra-Orthodox, the shoes of the dead are destroyed. No one is allowed to wear them afterward. Look at how baby shoes are treasured. There are even shoe-shaped good luck charms that you hang in your car. There's no end to it." But there is a beginning. The idea for her book, due to be published in the United Kingdom by Berg Publishers in October, and later by Macmillan in the United States, came about by accident. Nahshon: "A few years ago I was at a conference in Toronto. There was a shoe museum across the street. I had about 40 minutes to spare, so I said to myself: 'Let's go see what they have there.' You won't find a lot of men in the museum, but it did have interesting exhibitions on Native American footwear and brides' shoes. You are assaulted with a huge number of shoes. At some point it begins to get exhausting. "The first image that came to mind was of the piles of shoes of Holocaust victims. I thought about the image of the wandering Jew, whose shoes practically comprised all of his belongings, about the Exodus from Egypt, halitzah (a ceremony releasing a childless widow from levirate marriage), about 'biblical' sandals in Tel Aviv of the '50s, where I grew up. Shoes as a symbol of forced and voluntary exile to the Diaspora. My interest soon gained momentum. I started researching, commissioned articles and the book was born." Nahshon is interested in the shoe as a biographical object or historical- political symbol - not as a fashion accessory. "I asked myself questions about shoe-related religious customs. Why are shoes taken off during shivah (mourning period) How did the custom of taking off one's shoes in holy places come about? And what about Zionism, which yearned for contact with the earth, for conquering the land by foot, and so adopted the sandal as a compromise, instead of walking completely barefoot?" In his article "Summer, Sandals and the Zionist Dream" (in Hebrew), Ehud Ben Azar looks back at the myth of the young, sandal-sporting sabra (native-born Israeli), arguing that today's youngsters adopt foreign fads like sneakers and platform shoes, while only the elderly wear sandals, trying to reconnect to the old feeling of walking barefoot. Nahshon's enlightening book, accompanied by artwork - including details from the "Lost Shoe" series by artist Yosl Bregner - examines a range of subjects: the thousands of shoe-shaped gravestones in Jewish cemeteries in Ukraine, the symbolism of the shoe and cobbler in Yiddish folklore, the way in which work shoes blur gender distinctions, the significance of wearing shoes in the popular Hebrew play "King Solomon and Shalmai the Cobbler," the shoe in Hasidism and kabbala, in addition to the shoe as a means of segregation. It turns out that in Yemen and North Africa, it served a function similar to that of the yellow Star of David in Nazi Germany: Jews were not permitted to wear shoes and in this way were differentiated from non-Jews. Gadgets, not footwear The editor focuses on the Jewish angle that is close to her heart, but also sheds light on other religions and cultures throughout history. She does not disregard shoe fetishism and the place of the shoe in erotic-pornographic literature - the "identification of the shoe with female genitalia," from Freud to Derrida, the seductress who wears razor-sharp stilettos, the idea of drinking Champagne from the shoes of a dancer or singer ("kind of gross, if you think about it"), the tiny foot/shoe as the ideal of feminine beauty. She skips over the Cinderella ethos, in which fate and status are determined by shoe size, but mentions a short story by Jacob Steinberg, about a young blind woman, who correctly identifies her husband by touching his shoes. In Islam, Nahshon relates, the shoe is regarded as abject and dirty; one cannot even mention the word directly, and the ultimate offense is to be hit with a shoe. She recalls the shoes of the masses hurled at the broken sculpture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, as well those thrown at Israeli soldiers during the intifada. Nahshon contends that there is no such thing as "Jewish shoes." Jews' footwear is no different from non-Jews', especially considering the increasing exposure to the world, the blurring of global boundaries and the dominance of consumer culture today. Indeed, in her opinion, everyone looks equally ugly in Crocs, "like limping ducks." Israeli "institutions" like the Neve Sha'anan shoe street, she says, are long gone - to which people came from all over ("a pretty unique phenomenon in the world") - along with fads like Nimrod sandals, Hamegaper shoes and local manufacturers that "made nice shoes, quasi-Italian ones." Despite the fact that Kenneth Cole is Jewish, this nation has yet to produce a Manolo Blahnik of its own, a quintessential shoe icon. The Jewish mind invests in gadgets, but not so much in footwear. Meanwhile, the Knesset is still debating whether to allow entrance to people in sandals. "There is a rather extensive discourse about head-coverings in Judaism," says Nahshon, who was invited to give a lengthy lecture on the subject at the American Library of Congress, "from the shtreimel to knitted and black skullcaps, but no one has addressed the subject of shoes till now. It is the kind of thing that we overlook and never give much thought to, but researching the subject revealed an entire world. I am fascinated by it. "The shoe is first and foremost a symbol of movement, of human mobility. You can't move without it. Maybe [the late novelist-journalist] Dahn Ben-Amotz walked the streets of Tel Aviv barefoot, as an act of rebellion or defiance. How he didn't step on glass shards, I don't know, but most people in the world who don't have shoes would be happy to wear them. Take the example of [French President] Sarkozy, who tries to make himself taller with hidden heels. Look at Beijing - can you imagine the Olympics without shoes? There are also countless superstitions about shoes, which Jews have also adopted. You can't leave your shoes upside-down, so as not to upset the powers-that-be. To be honest, there is enough material for another book." But not a word about flip-flops Bookmark to del.icio.us   Voice of peace silenced Israeli peace pioneer Abie Nathan dies aged 81. DeadSeaScrolls.com World's oldest Bible fragments to be available online.

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