JewBu – Who Knew?
I ran across an article asking (rhetorically) if Sarah Jessica Parker was Hollywood’s Newest Jew-Bu.
I won’t keep you in suspense – she is.
And you know what? It turns out Leonard Cohen is a JewBu too.
Also listed as JewBu examples from entertainment are Goldie Hawn, Kate Hudson, Jerry Seinfeld, Gwynneth Paltrow, Larry David, Jeff Goldblum, Al Franken and Whoopie Goldberg. Leonard, however, seems especially hard-core JewBu, given his rich Jewish family heritage and his five years sojourn at the Mount Baldy Zen Center.
Serendipitously, the article both asks and answers the question on my mind:
What’s a Jew-Bu? ‘It’s a synthesis of Judaism and Buddhism intended to grasp the best of both religions,’ explains one Hollywood power-player who has been a Jew-Bu for the past decade. ‘It combines Buddhist thought with Jewish theology and structure, in effect incorporating Buddhist traditions such as meditation and chanting into traditional Judaism.’
Of course.
The article even provides a historical perspective.
The first trickle of Jews began to convert to Jew-Bu practices about 50 years ago. The beat poet Allen Ginsberg was among them, and wrote, ‘Born in this world/ you got to suffer/ everything changes/ you got no soul.’ By the 1970s, there were enough Jewish Buddhists for Ginsberg’s guru, Chogyan Trungpa, to talk about forming the Oy Vey school of Meditation. Now Jew-Bu’s are the largest group of converts in the West, with all the hallmarks of an established movement. Armfuls of literature pay tribute to their conversion experiences: “The Jew in the Lotus,” “One God Clapping,” and, of course, “That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist!”
Although “JewBu” was unknown to me until I read the piece on Sarah Jessica Parker, it turns out that the term has been in use at least since 2002 (the earliest date of use I found in a six minute Google search).
It is chagrining to discover for the first time a word that designates a fifty year old movement and that is a prime descriptor of Leonard Cohen. It’s truly humbling, however, not to have known the meaning of a term so well established that it has spawned competing T-shirt designs.
That’s the kind of thing that is going to happen when you’re a kid from the Ozarks1 trying to stay current in the hip and trendy world of religiosity endemic to the world of entertainment.
Eternal vigilance – that’s the ticket.
- Incredibly, there was, as far as I can determine, not a JewBu to be found in the rural area of southwest Missouri where I grew up.↩
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