Saturday 31 December 2016

Publications in 2016

Although a fair number of books, articles and essays, as well as poems and sayings have also appeared or are still to be published, the following is what can be considered officially puboished in 2016.

“Among the Midnight Cynics” Family Security Matters (22 January 2016) online at http://www.org/publications.detail/print/among-the-midnight-cynics.
2.”Nations on the Move, Now and Then” Family Security Matters (27 February 2016) online at http://www.org/publications.detail/print/nations-on-the-move-now-and-then
Book Review of Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Introduction to Zionism and Israel: From Ideology to History. (London and New York: Continuum International, 2012) on blog Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (16 March 2016); reposted on EEJH (18/5/2016).
“Of Mosques, Moms and Mayhem”: Review of Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, The Jihadi Dictionary on Family Security Matters (23 May 2016) online at http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/of-mosques-moms-and-mayhem, Reprinted in CBRNE Terrorism Newsletter (June 2016) pp.2-3; online athttp://www.cbrne-terrorism-newsletter-com; also in American Center for Democracy No. 1139 (26 June 2016).
“What to Kill for? What to Die for? What to Think About?” Family Security Matters (20 June 2016) online at http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/what-to-kill-for-what-to-die-for-what-to-think-about
“Anti-Semitism Again: Why Do They Hate Us So Much?” Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (17 July 2016) online at http://simmsdownunder.blogspot.com/2016/07/anti-semitism-again;repr. East European Jewish History (18 July 2016 ) online at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eejh
“Young Volunteers Fight with Kurds against Isis” Family Security Matters (2 August 2016) http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/print/young-volunteers-fight-with-the-kurds-and-against-isis
“Recipes - Gourmet Foods and Drinks of Forty-Seventh Street.1947-1953” Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (2 August 2016) online at http://simmsdownunder.blogspot.com/2016/08/reciipes. and reprinted on EEJH (4 August 2016) online at eejh@yahoogroups.com
“Sacrifice” Family Security Matters (4 August 2016) online at : http://www. familysecuritymatters.org/ publications/detail/sacrifice
“Contemporary Violent Death” Family Security Matters (18 August 2016) http://www. familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/print/contemporary-violent-death
“9/11 as a Moment of Historical Transformations” Family Security Matters (7 September 2016) http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/911-as-a-moment-of-historical-transformation
“Reading, Misreading and Misunderstanding Literature, History & Philosophy: Here we Go Again” on EEJH (Tuesday, 11 October 2016) also on Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (10 October 2016).
“Phantasmagorical Man”, review of Susan Roland. Hitler’s Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe’s Treasures (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2015) Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (13 October 2016); reprinted on EEJH (16 October 2016)
With Dov Bing, “The Worm in the Apple: Raubkunst, or The Art of Nazi Looted Art”, Mentalities/Mentalités 28:3 (2016)
“Anti-Semitism as Catachresis” Mentalities/Mentalités 2 :3 (2016) online, n.p.
« Je suis consterné… » in “Reflections on the AAA Boycott Resolution”, ed. Zev Gerber in Iggeret No. 88 (Fall 2016) pp. 7-8.
“The World Turned Upside Down” Family Security Matters (18 December 2016) online thttp://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/world-tutrned-upside-down

Wednesday 28 December 2016

Sayings for the end of 2016

Murky Sayings for the End of 2016

Good Deeds Go Unrecognized

Uncle Toby Shandy would gently and discreetly pick a fly off the dinner table and put it outside through the window. This became an emblem of sentimentality. If a fly is caught in your car, and you open the window to let it out on the other side of town, does it know where it is, and cannot ever find a new life?

The Solitude of Galaxies

I have decided to give up on the world as such, most of the galaxies, stars and black holes that already have names, and stop trying to count the stars. Only such vast stretches of blackness, anti-matter and uncreated potentialities not yet expressed, these perhaps I can handle with equanimity. They are not yet implicated in the seasons of terrorism we have known in our lifetime. But everything else is. Except for my own close family and few close friends.

Disoberdience

Unlike criminals who break the law out of greed, hate and uncontrollable passions, the most honourable of men and women break the law when the law is evil, when it crates the situation in which evil may be committed with no consequence, if not with a reward. Not passive resistance in the face of unacceptable actions of the state, but deliberate deeds to right the wrong, no matter what the consequence or cost.

To Whom Can We Turn?

We live in an age when ignorance masquerades as arrogant bluster, when it usurps the place of enlightenment, and when justice is undermined by whining miserable cowards. We are asked to tolerate the intolerable, to excuse the murderer on the grounds of equity, and to bite our tongues in the face of egregious lies. When the corridors of redress are the sources of corruption, where can we turn?

Text and Counter-Text

For as long as I can remember and anyone whom I ever knew, for two hundred years almost, to the Napoleonic Wars, no one ever felt safe or thought caution could be relaxed. There is no use dreaming backwards to a gold age of peace and safety and idle to speculate on a future without war, terrorism, violence and malice. If animals truly lived in peace with one another, there might be a modicum of hope. Why side with the graceful antelope, when the loping hyena must feed itself and its family?

Holiday Spirit

Every year, no matter where, people complain in newspapers that celebrating Christmas is a bore, a terrible ordeal being forced to sit with relatives one does not like, and stuffing oneself with foods that are not good for your health. Turn the page, the complaints are that too many are alone and destitute, lack support and comfort even for a day or an evening.

Festival of Lights

One says of Hannukah it is a scandal: the Maccabees were fanatics and puritans who opposed the openness of Greek cosmopolitanism and access to free thought and aesthetic sensitivities. Another says the Seleucid Greeks and Antiochus were ruthless barbarians, cruel dictators and corrupters of the righteous. Light the menorah candles, enjoy the sweet oily jelly-doughnuts, and spin the draydle for a chance to win some fine chocolate coins.

In the Galut

When you lift up the stone, the slugs, ants, bugs and other creepy-crawlies race about, confused by the light, fearful of the world above. schlemiels and shlamozzels squeal: give us back our rock, turn off the lights, let us hide from reality. Help, they cry, let us be safe little nothings. Don’t take away our toys. Do anything you want out there—murderer and slander—terrorism and delegitimize our homeland—but leave us alone. Please, give us back our little pishkele, our begging box and bowl. Don’t make us uncomfortable in our dark self-delusions. If we complained to the authorities, they would laugh at us, stomp on our heads, call us bad names, like kike and sheenie, or even worse: Zionist and Jew. Please love us and protect us, no matter at what cost in principles, morals, ethics, integrity or loyalty to our thousands and thousands of years of traditional learning. Above all, don’t make us think.

Back To Nature

Wordsworth thought the world was too much with us, and he found more wisdom in the woods from wind in the branches than in any school or philosophy. We think the world is too much with us when we neglect our studies, fail to learn logic, and forget history. He must have meant the world of men in their materialism and positivism; and yet he turned in society for the sake of irrationality, emotions and unconsciousness. Whence all this madness. Ours is rather a symbolic tree, formed in history, with luminous branches, spreading enlightenment—freedom, justice, truth, independence, defiance, rationalism, compassion and wit. Our wisdom is our ancestors engaged in debate and controversy, never accepting dictates that obfuscate reality, always challenging the thoughtless imposition of myth and ideology.

With Him Will I Dwell

In nights of trouble, we stand in the shadows and call for help from our friends and neighbours. One says to go away and stop making so much noise. Another says to wait until tomorrow because things maybe better by then. The third says, here, take this sack of sandwiches and fruit, then run off. Says the fourth, you can wait there until the morning, but then you must leave. When the fifth opens the window, he says in a whisper, open the door and wait in the vestibule, and later you must depart. And the sixth? He says come in and stay with me until it is safe to leave. Then the seventh one says, hide in my cellar as long as is needed. The eighth says, stay with me, and tomorrow I will go take you to a place of refuge. The ninth says, you are my friend and neighbour, and you are now part of my family. The tenth says nothing.

The Hunt

A charcoal black cat inches its way down the drive, heading for the bushes, the hydrangeas where it lurks. From the other side of the house, the ginger creature stares across the lawn. It too waits. Then beyond the plum tree, sidling its way into the tall grass, creeps through the rotting slats of the old gate, the white cat, somehow never sullied by its homelessness. All three of them seem to know, though they never say a word. The birds are at alert. The dozens of sparrows rise up to the branches. The black birds stand in mid-peck, hop this way and that. Gently I slide open the kitchen door, take hold of my long range pistol, well-charged with vinegar, and spray and growl and spray a wide loop across the grass. The birds are gone. The cats have disappeared. The plums lie on the shaded lawn. Sooner or later, all will return to play this game again, although my own part is not guaranteed. Who knows if the hunter will be awake or the gun loaded? Life is fickle.

Murky Sayings for the End of 2016

Good Deeds Go Unrecognized

The Solitude of Galaxies

Disoberdience

To Whom Can We Turn?

Text and Counter-Text

Holiday Spirit

Festival of Lights

In the Galut

Back To Nature

With Him Will I Dwell

The Hunt

Monday 21 November 2016

More Epithets and Apothegms

MELANCHOLY MUSING ON THE MEANING OF HISTORY

§ I read the history of Europe on the eve of the Holocaust, thinking as I do, such and such happened ten years, five years before I was born, and then three and two; and suddenly, that was on the day before I was born, and here is an incident when I was probably already crawling or walking or asking questions. Had I been born over there, in the Old Country, probably I would not be here now. Had my grandparents decided to leave the world of pogroms and persecutions fifty years before then, my parents would never have met, and their lives, like so many millions of others, been extinguished in grief, humiliation and pain. Each moment of recognition that I could have been in such and such a place when some catastrophe unfolded and at such and such time and yet have been oblivious to all the suffering is now unbearable. All this drives me to study harder and to try to picture what it was impossible then for me to know.

§ There were once so many old friends of the family, relatives and neighbours, now most of their names are forgotten, photographs cannot be identified, and online searches fail to show any details, if any at all. The whole world that filled up my life back then is mostly gone. In a short while, even that little will disappear. Can the huge gap be filled by the imagination?

§ Books come together in strange and exciting, often unexpected ways. One author deliberately or inadvertently goes over the same journey as another, discovers the same ideas lurking in the landscape and among the people he meets, though the lapse in time may be several generations. Another book meditates on a problem that has been worked out under very different circumstances by a previous author, and mere force of juxtaposition opens up new ways to examine life and history. In still others, writers argue with one another, answering the previous text, occupying the territory used as a novel’s setting, taking over the other’s characters and recreating them in new contexts. In other words, it is not enough to read one book on its own, or to see clusters of books forming a context for one another, or establishing chains of connectivity over long periods of time and criss-crossing each other’s paths with illuminating insights: we have to see ourselves as part of this matrix of inter-inanimation, and then imagine our parents, our friends, our communities within similar models of history. We are never alone, even if for the moment—lasting many generations—we have forgotten this essential truth.

§ Jokes, wit and comedy can prove to be useful approaches to problems that are otherwise irresolvable, although these resolutions to impasses and gaps in knowledge and emotional energy may be self-destructive and harmful to others. Seriousness and arrogance, however, more often do more than exacerbate the problems; in missing the point of a tragic situation, they destroy the very elements that can be salvaged as helpful relics and reminders of what has been lost, transformed into positive features by simple or complicated processes of polishing and redefinition and integrated into a more salutary experience that is strong enough to encompass past losses and misunderstandings. Irony, in other wor4ds, can work in several ways: not only by saying or saying that which is harmful and corrective in outright invective or more subtle satire, but by modifying or breaching the walls of indifference through a modification of the seemingly intransient barrier of insult and injury allowing sometimes for compromise and amelioration.

§ Sometimes it seems as though the whole world is tilting, sliding and collapsing into itself, those moments we remember always as so important that nothing on the previous side of our thoughts can ever be reconstructed in the same old way, and in which rugged pathways have to be negotiated before we reach a point from which everything starts to make sense again. We find the bits and pieces, the dribs and drabs, the fragments that were held very dear but now seem meaningless or infantile. We might put them in an album of pointless souvenirs or a cabinet of curiosities, and then, in a dozen years or a century, someone will see them and form a pattern, claim to see a collage or a prophetic dream. But anyone who was once there and has now forgotten will know that all the essentials are gone and the rhythms are fortuitous.

§ Speaking of earthquakes, I have been in a few big ones and they are scary—or funny, depending on your outlook. Once at night in Saint Louis, Missouri the bathtub started sloshing about and I was sure it would carry out down the street and into the Mississippi River in my glorious deshabile. Then there was a time in Israel when suddenly every tree swished and every bird rose up in a vast noisy cloud as the building slowly shook back and forth. It was so fascinating we forgot to hide under a table or in an archway.

§ Every thirty or forty years, the river starts to go down, the reservoirs upstream are closed, and one can see almost a whole dry bed. Around the bridges, what you will expect—bicycles, prams, shopping carts and a whole load of unrecognizable rubbish, metal and organic, corroded into sludge. Perhaps there are skeletons of dogs and cats or fragments of other life forms, but you would have to poke around in the mud. Further along, the smell isn’t too bad, except for rotting bushes and river weeds, where the ducks used to nest. No fish, of course. Turtles and frogs have long since gone. Only memories remain, hidden under the surface, like a Golem, waiting to be revived when the next catastrophe appears.

§ There are times when life shows itself to be precarious and teetering on the rim of its own demise. We have already once or twice come right up to the precipice, looked down, and, feeling a little dizzy, waited for some not so strong wind to push us over. Later, on a dark, rainy evening, hardly able to see the road, another vehicle loudly slid past, and between the screech and the silence, one simply waited for what is inevitable to come, and the waiting was itself painful and eventually humiliating. Then not too long ago, pieces of time fell out of consciousness, empty spaces of silence and invisibility, and though each had only been intermittent, a few moments, an hour or two, it is now evident that sooner or later the veil will come down, thick and heavy, with no breeze to blow it away.

§ Hallucinations came for many days, and were retold as myths over the next few years, and then after so many generations no one could them rationalized into ideologies. Then as philosophers picked apart the ideas, they made a system which everyone could believe, and things left over were preserved as decorations. At this point, some scientists scrutinized the images, put them to the test, and, finding one or two made sense, decided that long ago what everyone believed was true. The ideas were allegorized to make better sense, and thus everyone was very happy. Except Jonah who tried to run away and Job who never stopped arguing, and even Esther who learned to do the job all by herself that no one else was willing or able to do. Do you see what I mean?

Monday 7 November 2016

Sayings for November

PECULIAR APHORISMS and PSEUDO-PROVERBS

In this age of deceit and dissonance, the only hope is to find someone who cares enough to dissent and desist. Otherwise there is neither hope nor trust.

When the troubles began, I planted many seeds on the window sill, watered them, and watched them break out towards the sun. The time would come, soon, for setting them out in the garden, and waiting for the vegetables to mature. But the troubles continued. I could not face the normal rhythms of nature. Now the soil is dry.

Someone tells a story, and goes on and on. Everyone falls asleep. When we awake, he is still speaking. The next time we awaken, he is gone. “What was he going on about?” Everyone shrugs. It is not true, then, that a well-told tale grabs our attention and takes our consciousness to new heights. “What’s that you said?”

We thought, if you got to know your enemy and were patient, it would either pass or we would learn to live with it. But they and we and it have lost all distinction and you are beyond understanding. Clouds dissolve into the sunset, colours drain away, sleep covers over the will to think.

Someday all these youngsters with strange names and misspelt versions of traditional names will grow old and they will sit around in the retirement village, tired and grey, gossiping and swapping reminiscences, and no one will realize how ridiculous they sound when they speak to one another by name.

The rain falls perpendicular in heavy, long cables, as the French say. The sun cuts across in a horizontal swathe, blindingly, as though to intimidate us. This is as much as anyone can take. “As if I cared.”

If Heidegger were a hedgehog, we would never understand him. If Nietzsche found his niche in history, would we care? Swedenborg and Kierkegaard could never be friends for all they shared of northern gloom. Ludwig Wittgenstein almost poked Karl Popper with a poker.

He is sixteen. He watches children’s television and sees the propaganda. He goes outside, walks to the road, sees a woman, stabs her as she stands with her daughters. He goes home, notices blood on his shirt, wonders what that is. Then he sits on the couch with his parents and looks at a movie. The police arrive and everyone is surprized. Verdict: This young man has “issues”.

It was against my principles to read diaries, letters, memoires, biographies and other personal writings. Authors should be known by their art—poetry, novels, plays, essays. I avoided studying anyone whose life overtook his or her literary achievement, whose life seemed to be mere gossip. So mostly what was avoided were the texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Then things changed. I grew old. Life is too precious to be skipped over and the memory of rumours and gossip is the stuff of reality. It may be too late to catch up on all I missed, but most of all, I missed most of my own life.

In the early decades nineteenth century there were complaints that with steam engines, telegraph messages and a plethora of daily newspapers, the new generation would be growing up with an information overload, unable to digest everything that impinged on their insecure lives. By the end of that century, telephones, motor cars and cinema threatened the intelligence of civilized nations. Soon there would be wireless voices and flying machines, electric iceboxes and bread-slicing machines. Is there no end to this madness?

There are four categories of traditional communication: (1) exclamations and designations by word of mouth; (2) poetic utterances of metaphoric and metonymic truth; (3) rhetorical patterns of emotional stimulation and soothing; (4) notes and pictures magnetized to the refrigerator door.

It is said that within a very few years, no high school or university students will have been born in the twentieth century. Already there are many who cannot remember a childhood without television, and soon those who cannot imagine life without computers and mobile phones. Popular culture has eclipsed the fine arts and classical music. I myself gave up and withdrew from the world in 1953 after the rock’n’roll show at the Brooklyn Paramount with Alan Freed who pounded on a telephone book for the Big Beat. From that moment on, in my budding adolescent heart, I knew civilization was doomed. Yet for years I kept (though never played) the free 45-recording of “Greasy Spoon”.

Nevertheless and notwithstanding, we have to deal with unpalatable truths. Like the naïve traveller who wanders through the forest searching for mushrooms without knowing which are poisonous or not, if we have no authorities we can trust, how much dare we taste in experiment? One thing for sure, however, we have learned elsewhere, that alluring appearance and pleasant smell cannot be our guide.

***

Wednesday 2 November 2016

Poem for early November

Earthquakes

Not Kierkegaard’s earthquakes, metaphorical,

Nor Lisbon’s ingenious conceit of Catholic sin,

Nor Lima’s premonitions of the world’s spherical

Demise, spinning out of control, veins of tin

And silver colliding from one end of the globe to another;

Nor this year’s Italian tremblings, tremor after tremor,

Lamentations of disorder, seismograph

No internal eye could ever photograph,

Disingenuous monitoring of tectonic plates,

As though we teetered on rust encrusted skates

And gathered in the rubble-strewn squares and plazas, nuns

And invalids, firemen and visual journalists, while suns

Do cartwheels in the mountains and siren puns

Elucidate the crunching of the fault-lines

Into a poetry of fossil creatures without spines

Who now emerge from deep within the lava

Caverns and shake their tentacles—we have a

Situation on this planet from tsunamis in the north

To melting icecaps in the south. To go forth

As though the spiritual world and the moral mind

Are as they were in Søren’s time, or with Voltaire’s kind

Of rational certainties is now patently absurd;

We flee the fissures, the fractures and the fatuous word.

Tuesday 1 November 2016

Piques and Kvetches

On the Fatuity of Professional Whinging

Every now and then something piques my professional soul. It either happens to me when I read an essay that talks about things I wrote about a long time ago as though the author were the first person in the world to broach the topic or to find some new detail worth discussing. After searching the footnotes and bibliographical references and not finding my name at all, I trace the little hollow feeling in my stomach when it turns to a lump of disgust; then it passes away, not completely—it has happened too often to let it fester—but sufficient to make me alert for the next instance.

This same feeling comes back when the months and then the years go by after a book of mine has been published and there are no reviews, or there are one or two and they seem to miss the point altogether: such as someone who accuses me of being a post-modernist and therefore obviously of having no sense of humour, when the text they are supposedly dealing with is long witty exposition of a problem unsolvable by post-modernist jargon and conceptual formulæ, with my title proclaiming the joke for all to see, and then a series of long footnotes explaining, as one ought not to have to do, how the Witz works. Or when someone rants on about some trivial typographical error, misspelled word or infelicitous phrase in translation, but never puts the argument in context or sees the interwoven process of midrashic explication.

Too often I find authors and their publishers claiming to be dealing with subjects for the first time when in fact my own work has long preceded theirs. sometimes by decades. They may have different views, occasionally access to information unavailable to me, and perhaps better arguments: however, they are not the first or the only ones, and as proper scholars it is their job to be aware of what has gone before and then to indicate why they are going back over the old turf.

I know exactly why these scholars skip over my work—books and articles or edited collections. (1) I am not there (wherever "there" may be, in Europe, North America or in Israel) so have no prestige or influence to be dealt with. (2) My work has often been published in "obscure" journals or by "little" publishers, and yet these are relative terms and it only means that any "literature search" has been sloppy and incomplete. (3) I have not toed the party line, whether of some supposed political correctness or of traditional protocols; and yet, in a significant number of instances, what the "established" academic writes is really no more than I have, some sometimes misses key points I made which are still valid after 20 or 30 years.

Of course, to complain is to be a crank, to prove my lack of professional seriousness, and to confirm the futility of any endeavour to correct the fault. Sometimes I have written lengthy reviews of the books that neglect my work, but these comments have been neglected—one might as well flush the argument down the drain. Sometimes I have tried to contact the author and ask what is going on, but there is neither no response or some temporizing or fatuous comment that we could discuss this somewhere or other beyond my ability to travel—my flying days are over.

So I am speaking to you, my dear reader or perhaps readers, however many of you there are that for some reason or other look into my blog.

Thursday 13 October 2016

BOOK REVIEW: Phantasmagorical Man

Susan Roland. Hitler’s Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe’s Treasures. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2015. xiv + 386 pp + 16 pp of unnumbered black-and-white and coloured plates.

Since the early 1990s, books and articles on Nazi art looting, plundering and confiscations from private Jewish collectors and public museums have proliferated, and these added to the innumerable courtroom documents and legal reports prepared by lawyers, co-opted scholars and bureaucrats to fight for and against cases of restitution make up an irrefutable argument for the extent of the crime, its significance to the history of the Holocaust, and, more and more, to the way in which the trade in stolen paintings provided much-needed cash to keep the Third Reich fighting at least two or three years beyond that its own industrial and financial base would have allowed. How many millions of lives could have been saved had not the Swiss provided a means for using art sales to finance the purchase of vital materiel for the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, let alone the construction of death camps and crematoria? Or what destruction could have been prevented throughout the battlefields and cities of Europe had not the greedy private and institutional dealers in North America circled the auction houses to feed off the vast amount of under-priced masterpieces that flooded into the market from the late 1930s through to the end of World War Two (and even beyond)?

Documentary and feature films, glamorous and gritty, as well as novels and television dramas, romantic and ridiculous, provide another dimension, the human tragedy of so many millions of lives ruined and so much art lost and the grotesque and even farcical scenes of perfidious buffoons stealing and cheating from one another. Some of these materials deal with the victims, some with the victimizers, and some with the inadvertent heroes or abetters of further grief and humiliation, naïve judges who have no sense of history, perplexed family members who are bamboozled into bad deals, ambitious lawyers blinded to the personal feelings they trample on, cynical politicians trying to hide their own or their parents’ collusion during the war, idealist scholars trudging on through the mud unaware of how far their own careers are being stunted….

Art was not just big business in the Third Reich run by wretched little creatures, it was what mattered, at a time when currencies around the world had suffered enormously during the Great Depression, often as philatelists know from a hyperinflation that made a letter across town cost several million marks or pengos, objets d’art substituted for other kinds of investment and savings, so that robbing Jewish families of their possessions was effectively destroying their lives. Not just outright pilfering but also forced sales imposed on desperate people—some made to sign documents while already in a concentration camp—and huge taxes that had to be paid in order to cross borders, all this signalled a feeding frenzy among the unscrupulous dealers, auction houses, museum directors and individuals seeking bargains at the expense of other people’s misery.

And there they all are laid out before us in this book, from the bigwigs, like Hitler and Goering, who credited themselves with enormous knowledge and sensitivity as art connoisseurs, to the lesser beings who scurried about like rats and cockroaches, doing their duty, cheating on one another, trying to protect their personal collections and their families, willing to betray anyone and everyone and especially to see Jews and political dissidents be taken away to certain death, preparing complicated lies and half-truths to exonerate themselves when the inevitable end came to the Third Reich.

The whole enterprise of documenting this sad and ridiculous, horrible and pathetic series of events is far from over, not just because museum directors and legal experts still clash over unresolved cases in hundreds of unresolved cases—in the United States, as well as in Europe—as second and third generation heirs to murdered and plundered victims become aware of what had been done to their families and where long-lost or presumably destroyed objects of great financial as well as sentimental value emerge in auction catalogues and provenance records of respectable institutions, as well as in misattributed displays in scholarly tomes and much-touted travelling exhibitions. Moreover, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the running out of time-limits on locked archives around the world, greater stores of documents, photographs and private memoirs become available to be sifted through.

What Susan Roland does, for she is more novelist than historian, is extrapolate from the evidence the feelings, personality and thus the motivations of the family she focuses on, especially Cornelius the grandfather who was an architect historian, Hildebrand the father who as the title indicated was Hitler’s art thief (or “king Raffke”), and Cornelius Gurlitt the son who recently was discovered to be hoarding thousands of supposedly lost paintings in his Munich flat. She synthesises many of the latest books on Nazi Art Looting, ferrets out details from the scholarly articles, legal documents and private memoirs now available and sets these facts within the contexts of political, military, diplomatic and artistic events and theories; but then, what fictional writers have always done in creating historical novels and romances, Roland imagines what the characters think, and feel, paints word-pictures of how they converse and dream, and creates the illusion of coherent understanding where professional historians are limited to probable scenarios, debatable missing links in the chain of cause-and-effect, and honest confessions of ignorance as to the meaning of it all.

After the death of the elder Hildebrand in an automobile accident and soon after that of his mother by cancer, young Cornelius was left alone, and had only his married sister to relate to. He eventually became, in Roland’s expression, a “phantasmagorical man”, perhaps autistic, certainly withdrawn, secretive, and cut off from most of the post-war and then even the digitally communicative world, but all in all no fool. Living within the law, as he understood it, he kept to himself and “his friends”, the paintings his father had collected through means that for the most part Cornelius—who is presented as a somewhat pathetic figure of a child whose personality and mind was blighted by his parents’ greed—was unaware of, always maintaining to himself and others that Hildebrand had been a heroic saviour and protector of art from the Nazis. After nearly seventy years of a rather furtive existence of selling one painting at a time for cash, he was finally caught put on suspicion of tax evasion, hounded by the police and the press, bewildered by the unwanted attention, grieved by the confiscation of his “friends,” and then, shortly before his death in his nineties, he made a will, leaving his whole collection to a small museum in Bern, Switzerland. That museum agreed to accept all but contested works of art, and thus the matter stands, with few instances of restitution made, much gnashing of teeth by German officials, and most of the world not much the wiser as to the full extent of whereabouts all the hoard Hildebrand Gurlitt had amassed by one shady deal or nefarious transaction or another

Tuesday 11 October 2016

Misreading and Misunderstanding Literature, History & Philosophy

Here we Go Again

Reading Chaucer’s heart-rending portrait of a child

ritually murdered by Jews in The Pardoner’sTale….[1]

Oh really? Has this author, who claims that he spent four years studying the “classics of English Literature” actually ever read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales? Go back to the text and look at what is there in the strange narrative recounted of how a little Christian scholar at a choir school somewhere in the East is killed, not by the Pardoner , but by the Prioress. The boy, barely old enough to memorize the Latin hymns he is learning to chant, walks through the central street in a Jewish quarter of his city singing Alma Redemptoris (Mother of Mercy) in praise of the Virgin Mary. Though this little clergeon has no idea of what the words mean, the people who hear it do, and one of them is enraged, pulls the child off to the side, stabs him and throws him in a privy. One ordinary Jew, not the whole community or a cabal of rabbis; a crime of passion carried out in secret, not a ritual act. There is no drawing of blood to make matzoh, no attempt to parody or repeat the Crucifixion.

If there is anything religious in The Prioress’s Tale it is in her attempt to provide an occasion for a miracle by the Virgin Mary because the not-quite-yet-completely dead victim lying in the open sewer continues to sing his hymn. When this is is heard, it is heard by Christian officials in the town who then call upon the Muslim rulers—for this is an Eastern place where Jews and Christians live by sufferance under Islamic rule. The boy’s corpse is carried out of the Jewish quarter to the Christian neighbourhood and placed in a church. Investigating the victim, the clergyman removes a piece of the Eucharistic wafer from the child’s mouth and the singing ceases. The Christian mob, with the tacit approval of the qadi or Islamic judge, race back to the juderia or calle , grab a group of Jews, and kill them on a public pyre.

If you look closely at Chaucer’s text and see how he deliberately avoids all the specific markers of a Blood Libel narrative, you still have to wonder why he makes the Prioress—that rather foolish, snobbish and hypocritical woman who was once Lady Eglyntine before she was put into a convent as its head—tell such a bloodthirsty tale. Not only do we know from her introductory description in The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales that she has no religious calling and still tries to maintain her courtly mannerisms, being more concerned with etiquette than faith or spirituality, and if she has any mercy in her soul, it is squeamishness about mice caught a trap. But we learn from her own Prologue to her Tale that she is obsessed by mouths and what goes in and out of them, and not only words. In fact, a very close and symptomatic reading of the text indicates that she was probably abused as a child, if not by her father or brother, then by someone else who forced her to have oral sex; and her neurotic traits may be why she was taken off the marriage circuit and placed in a religious house where, too, her own sexual frustrations fester.

Like those commentators who continue to read The Merchant of Venice as though it were a vicious slander against Jews, Shylock in particular, and castigate Shakespeare as an anti-Semite—as certainly T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound later were—the author of this essay on Martin Heidegger undermines his own argument by such an obvious and egregious error. Again a close reading of Shakespeare’s tragedy (or is it more a tragi-comedy?) can see that whatever Shylock’s faults, they are given motivation in his environment—a Venice which is ruled over by a love-sick neurotic Duke, under the thumb of a local Inquisition, and peopled by Christian hypocrites of various sorts, not least by young lovers who lack scruples, principles and refined feelings—thus will go against the stipulations of a will, falsify legal interpretations in court to win a case, and misconstrue the traditions of courtly love to seduce one another.

As for Adam Kirsch ‘s evaluation of Martin Heidegger as a Nazi, he is certainly correct there. But not quite so when he tells us that Heidegger is nonetheless a preeminent twentieth-century philosopher, and that he still has trouble reconciling his very negative feelings about the man who joined the Nazi party and oversaw the dismissal of its Jewish professors and has never felt the need to apologize for his collaboration with the perpetrators of the Holocaust—and his admiration for Being and Time, Heidegger’s magnum opus. Perhaps the “refreshment” of old ideas that Kirsch finds so important in this philosopher’s work need to be reconsidered in the light who are the actual followers of Heidegger in the Post-Modernist pantheon of writers (one hesitates to say “thinkers”), beginning with Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher’s student mistress. As Stephen Hicks puts it:

Heidegger is notorious for the obscurity of his prose and for his actions and inactions on behalf of the National Socialists during the 1930s, and he is unquestionably the leading twentieth-century philosopher for the postmodernists. Derrida and Foucault identify themselves as followers of Heidegger.[2]

These people started a movement which these days push for the anti-Israeli measures, make excuses for terrorism and anti-Americanism, and generate further ideas inimical to the essential Jewish ideas of truth, justice and mutual responsibility. Kirsch rightly points out that the recently published and translated Black Books of Heidegger leave no doubt that he was an out-and-out anti-Semite, tended towards and often coincided with Nazi principles, and blamed the Jews for any misunderstandings of his work. The conclusion Kirsch reaches then?

Heidegger’s Nazism does not mean we should stop thinking about him: on the contrary, it is all the more urgent to think about him so we that we can learn how to think against him.

Is that it? Learning to think against him, not doing anything at all to counter the pernicious influence he had and still has on so many of the so-called great great thinkers in the universities and media today? With misunderstandings of Chaucer’s tale and Shakespeare’s play constantly recurring in terms that call for them not to be taught any more or produced on the public stage, resistance to repeated explanations of how the poem and the tragedy are about rather than for Judeophobic themes and images that run through most of our own high culture—and therefore ought to be topics for discussion in classes and newspapers so as to teach how great writers oppose pernicious ideas—why does Heidegger get away with it? Of course, I am not arguing for censorship but for cogent, incisive and sensitive readings of all texts which have great influence on the world we live in. If Chaucer and Shakespeare should be taught and produced in terms of their real meanings, and that includes how generations have misunderstood them and misused them, why should Heidegger be allowed to stand as an unquestioned major source of contemporary thought and not be revealed through his disciples and avatars and thus downgraded to the dangerous background?[3]

[1] Adam Kirsch, “Heidegger was really a Nazi” The Tablet (26 September 2016).

[2] http://www.stephenhicks.org/2009/11/30/heidegger-and-postmodernism-ep/

[3] A convenient list of who these pleasant folk are can be found in Giulio Meotti, “Meet the Western Charlatans Justifying Jihad” Gatestone Institutre (28 September 2016) online at https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8741/western-intellectuals-jihad; they include Michel Orfray, Thomas Piketty, Peter Sloterdijk, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Zisek, José Saramago, Jean Baudrillard, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dario Fo…

Tuesday 13 September 2016

Mosaic at Huqoq (Israel)

They call me Alexander, Alexander the Great,

And I have travelled far, very far already,

And hope, the gods being willing, to travel further,

All the way to the ends of the earth, across many seas,

Over mountains that reach the sky, passing deserts

That seem never to end, and then more rivers

Where I hope to conquer the unconquerable tribes

Who are hardly human yet so powerful the heavens

Tremble just to hear of them, yes, I Alexander.

And these, may a humble priest of a humble people

Demand of one so great, are these your armies, your beasts

With long proboscis and ivory tusks? You surely

Cannot hope to lead to the very edge of reality, the place

Where sky meets horizon and falls into never-quenching night.

My holy books and ancient traditions tell of lands

And nations beyond the oceans and mountains, and yet no one

Has ever been so far, not even our ancestors who wrote

The scrolls we study to understand the universe.

They do not call me great conqueror for nothing, priest.

My name resounds throughout the world from west to east,

In every city and on every island where people dwell,

And no one ever doubted my capacity to travel far,

Far beyond their dreams and where their dreams are born.

But let me demand of you, as I have heard the fame you bear,

You people of the Holy Books and guardians of the Law,

Tell me this one thing that bothers me—that when I have seen

The very ends of the earth where it melts into the sky,

Will I be able to return, if not with armies, slaves and wealth,

But with my consciousness intact, to enjoy my victories?

A very heavy question you have put to me, oh great conqueror of men,

And one a humble man such as I myself can only answer with the words

Our God will perhaps provide in the hours of sleep tonight,

For never have we met someone so proud and powerful as you

And yet so respectful of our wisdom that you inquire of me a truth

That may expose me to your wrath.

Do not worry, priest of this holy land, I have heard enough to value

Such wisdom as you have. My anger will be restrained, and you

And your people, no matter what, will have my protections, so long

As I may live—and I expect to live for many years to come.

My mind trembles before you, for now we are dependent on your life

For our safety and our life. Let me say this, then, before the vision

Enters my inner chamber after the sun has fallen into night:

Your name will live forever among us, and our sons, from the greatest

To the lowest, will be called Alexander in your honour, even priests

And generals, as well as teachers, scribes and kings. Now great

Alexander, leave me to my silent duties in the Temple,

And tomorrow with the breaking of the dawn I will expound

What the Voice from Heaven whispers in my ear.

In the morning, it is said, when the High Priest, Kohan haGadol

Emerged from the Holy of Holies, the armies of Macedonia

Had gone, elephants and camels, horses and asses, all,

Even the young and arrogant Alexander; and though

He never returned to the City of David, generations of the Book

Bore his name in gratitude and this beyond the days

When generals and armies, who had survived the march

To the very ends of the known world, fought among themselves

And turned in anger on the people of Jerusalem

And fouled the sacred precincts of the Temple.

Look at this mosaic found at Huqoq for all the proof you need:

The mighty conqueror and the humble priest face to face.

The rabbi and his congregation who built this synagogue understood.

The archaeologists, however, argue year after year: who is he,

Alexander or Antiochus? Perhaps a poet knows the truth

Because he lets the figures made of little stones speak for themselves.

Thursday 25 August 2016

Ironic Rambings

Fantastic Fantasies of a Fanciful New World

The question came up recently which set my mind thinking. What to do with the French Jews facing more and more terrorist attacks, kidnappings, robberies, insults? They really can’t stay much longer or feel safe anywhere in Europe any longer.

From historical experience, they need to pack up and leave quickly, or perhaps wait until the coming elections to see who becomes the government. But if they leave, it needs to be orderly, and also make a grand political gesture, that they are taking their wealth, their experience, their heritage with them. It would have to be the young and busy people and their families, and not just the elderly and the retired. They could leave France to stew in its own cauldron of Muslim fundamentalism.

But where would they go? Not all of the Jews of France can move to Israel and into Netanya sur le mer and loll about the cafes and support the importers of fine cheese and wine. It would be a shame to give up their French language and culture. So maybe they should go where so many others have in the last five years, to la belle province of Quebec, and help develop Montreal as the Paris of North America. That then might in turn start to inspire non-Jewish intellectuals, artists and academics, who aren't swept away in the ride of left-wing post-structuralist and post-modernist suicidal political correctness, to go over to Canada as well. Finally, a strong and free non-Americanized Canada; and the weather is warming up too, with more land becoming arable in Labrador, if only the Esquimaux could share in the wealth and progress, without losing even more of their heritage.

Most of Europe has sold out completely to the Islamic masses. Other sane and secular people might also make the move and there would be a strong of cultured, democratic semi-autonomous statelets or non-Anglophone enclaves within 150-200 kilometres of the US border, filling in the gaps between the already existing Canadian cities.

There would be no use going southwards to Trumpish/Sanderonian, Clintonic America, full of reactionary Tea-Party, xenophobic and anti-Darwinian dumbies, racdketeers, corrupt bankers and Wall Street blowhards. The good Americans could perhaps then actually do what they threaten to do if any of the above came to government, move to Canada. They might squeeze on to Prince Edward Island, if there were enough. Or if they really came in droves, Wagons north! perhaps a deal might be struck with Greenland to begin to settle and farm some of the unfreezing territory, provided the new immigrants were willing to learn Inuit languages or at least Danish.

Most of Latin America is still full of basket-case economies and drug-cartel crime. Only Belize or a rented out Galapagos island or two seems a feasible option. Uruguay has taken too many extreme positions lately to be trusted. And the Falkland Islands have already had their fair share of international attention.

New Zealand, or as it is better known today, Middle Earth and Xena the Warrior Princess’s stomping ground, or at least the balmy South Pacific? If only the French hadn't given up on Akaroa and developed their colony, despite the British treaty with the Maori Tribes on the North Island. I am not sure the French Jews could go in large numbers to Tahiti, New Caledonia or other small Polynesian or Melanesian islands, even though there was a brief period when the Queen of Tahiti was married to a Jew—and something interesting might have developed had he not been more interested in little commercial ventures. Ditto for the German Jewish shopkeepers who went to Tonga, Samoa and German New Guinea. When the would-be German colonists came to New Zealand, there probably were no Jews among them, but, even if there were, when the burgher families saw what they had thought would be a good place to settle from what they saw on the map back in Deutschland, and it turned out to be White Island, that is, a volcano and a pile of guano, they quickly turned around left, leaving at best a handful of Lutheran pastors to build a hut or two on some tiny islands between Stewart Island (then called the South Island) and the South Island (then called the Middle Island or New Munster). That's why there are so few Lutherans here today.

An alliance between Monaco, Andorra and Lichtenstein might take a good lead in organizing these transformation of geopolitics, although if a superpower such as Malta, Luxembourg or Costa Rica (should we add East Timor?) would lend a hand, the process would run more smoothly. St.-Pierre et Miquelon have always stood for a toehold of France in North America, and so perhaps, if we push aside the rum smugglers and illegal fishing boats, we might be able to use them as advance staging posts for the new armada of Jewish and other intellectual refugees.

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