- “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
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.
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
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.
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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