Primrose Road

At yesterday's Nextbook Festival of Ideas: Jews and Power, Stephen Greenblatt shared a Shakespeare-authorship anecdote during a talk entitled "Culture, Taste, and Power." It involved one of the Earl of Oxford's descendants making his audience a bit uncomfortable when he labeled William Shakespeare of Stratford a "shyster." The talk should be posted on the Nextbook site within two weeks; I encourage all both of my readers to check it out.

I am already fifty pages into novelist / philosopher / academic Rebecca Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza, in which she holds Spinoza's life and work up against the account presented to her by a history teacher at a Bais Yaakov high school in the late 1960s. Yesterday, Goldstein and Shalom Auslander spoke about power relations within the Jewish community, how oppression today can happen from within, not just from outside, the community.

In-community Jewish intellectualism is definitely a breath of fresh air when Jewish-American culture among those in their 20s and 30s often seems (at least to me) dominated by twin philosophies of "any comment critical of / realistic evaluation of Israel means that you're an anti-Semite" and "Jews must necessarily believe in God, and this was always historically so" as well as justalittefascist ultra-Orthodox outreach organizations like Aish who serve up some ultra-right-wingnuttery with their Torah.

A favorite excerpt from Goldstein's book thus far, written in the voice of her Orthodox girls' school history teacher:

"It would be a Jew who would make philosophy into one long argument against the existence of God and against the difference between right and wrong, so that philosophy, girls, has been, ever since modernity, the most dangerous subject that you can possibly study."

Young Jewish people: A little bit of Benjamin, Adorno, Arendt, etc. will also do you some good. ;) Intellectualize!