Publications in first half of 2017

1. Jews in the Illusion of Paradise: Dust and Ashes, Volume 1, “Comedians and Catastrophes”.  Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.  426pp.
2. Jews in the Illusion of Paradise: Dust and Ashes, Volume II, Falling out of Place and into History

 Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017

3. Claire Desthomas Demange and Robert Louis Liris, « Dossier. Poésie et psychanalyse. Norman Simms: Poète et psychanalyste » Les Voix d’Amélie No. 7 (janvier à juin 2017) pp. 6-8.
4. Review of Matthew Beaumont and Matthew Inglesby, eds., C.K. Chesterton, London and Modernity in Journal of Religious History (2017) [forthcoming]
5. Review of Azzan Yadin-Israel, Scripture and Tradition: Rabbi Akiva and the Triumph of Midrash in Journal of Religious History (2017) [forthcoming]
6. With Dov Bing, “The Politics of Ashkenazi-Sephardi Exile in the Netherlands: Alkmaar in the Early Seventeenth through the late Twentieth Century” Sefardi Newsletter (2017) [forthcoming]
7. “Living for the Moment: Livid for a Moment” Family Security Matters (1 April 2017)  online at http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/details/living-for-the-moment-livid-for-a-moment
8. “Fatal Contraptions, Misconceptions and the Painful Pangs of Parturition”  Journal of Art and Aesthetics [forthcoming]
9. “Phantasmagoria, Folklife and Beyond”  in NATIONALISM, PEASANTRY AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN INDIA : Festschrift to Prof. K .K. N. Kurup (forthcoming)
10. With Dov Bing, “Nazi Confiscation of Art and the Trickery that Followed” Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism 1:1 (2017)

Poem for early June

Call me Yorgos

On April 8, 1820, a farmer named Yorgos Kentrotas came across the statue in pieces near the ruins of an ancient city on the island of Milos (formerly known as Melos). Some say the peasant’s name was Yorgos Bottonis and that he and his son Antonio were poking around in the walls of the city when they found a niche containing several fragments of ancient statuary,

That’s right, call me Yorgos, or perhaps George,

Or whatever, it has always been that way,

My father and his father, too, all of them,

As far back as anyone can remember, and give

Or take a century or a millennium.

We have always lived here, ploughed the fields, one ox

Or another, always the same.  Two hundred years

Ago or perhaps two thousand, I was here.

Call me Yorgos.  The sailors come and ask

For treasures, so we save them when we can, though

Sometimes there were those who dragged

The statues to their kilns for limestone, and when

The ground shudders, as it does from time to time,

The caves and niches disappear. So we forget,

Until the day comes, as it did to my grandfather’s grandfather,

And the bullock stumbled near the wall.  Then Yorgos

Pushed aside some earth, peered in, and saw the face

Looking back at him, that woman, whom

The French sailor said was Aphrodite,

A pagan whore, no doubt, but he would pay

To own her, so we dug her out, with all those

Other pieces.  What use was she to us,

Without her arms or legs?  He made us look

Again, and we sold him other limbs and faces.

After he sailed away, another Yorgos, read

In a book, and there she was,, our broken statue

In a photo, standing in the city of the French.

They called her Venus from our island, Milos.

Because we have so many apple trees.

That is my mother’s grandmother’s face, he said,

And perhaps her ancestor as well, one century

Or another, their faces always return to us.

She was no whore, then? Like our names, the same,

Even after a thousand centuries. 

The Frenchmen come, the Germans, the English, too,

And ask if we have more like her, this woman

Without arms or legs but with a face we know too well.

Yorgos, they say, do you know who made this statue?

Yorgos says, as he always does, we have all

Forgotten, and we only find these stones by chance

When we go into the stony fields with our ploughs and oxen.

But that is not true, I know, I tell myself,

Yorgos to Yorgos.  They are always there to be found.

Two hundred years ago or a thousand, no matter.

We were here before the Athenians and the Spartans,

Long  before their Phidiases and Praxiteles,

Before there were sailors on the winedark seas.

We grew up out of the earth, like sterile stones,

Until the sun warmed our hearts into life

And the faces of our mothers smiled on us.

And when we died, we sank back into the earth

Without dreams or memories. Our limbs

Fall off, our faces fade, our hearts turn cold .

The apple trees blossom and die. Their fruit

Sinks into the fertile fields, time out of mind.