Primrose Road

In Jews and Power, Ruth Wisse divides her exploration of Jews' relationship to power into three interconnected time periods: first, the Biblical era through the European Renaissance; then, the Enlightenment, which brings about liberal democracies that permit Jews to become citizens but unintentionally lead to the rise of pogroms; and finally, the founding of Israel and Israel's development as a military power in the face of Arab challenges to the country's sovereignty. I thought that she offered a number of interesting arguments that complicated the Judaism/Jewish ethnicity/power triangle in Parts 1 and 2; unfortunately, she did not seem to do enough to complicate this relationship in Part 3.

Early on, Wisse notes that Jews' relationship to political power as laid out by the Bible has never been entirely uncomplicated, especially in comparison to the other Abrahamic religions. Writing that "Christian countries may have fought in the name of God, but they did not contemplate fighting by the rules of their savior" (15), she explains why there is no such thing as 'ethnic' Christianity, while the Jews, whose beliefs required them to always follow Torah law to the letter, seemed to constitute their own country-less nation regardless of where they lived. For the Islamic people, there was a stronger perceived relationship between political power and religion because the prophet Muhammad was clearly portrayed as a warrior, religious leader, and political leader who organized his people on both the battlefield and in the city. Moses, meanwhile, was a prophet who gave the people Israel a set of laws but was not involved in actively enforcing them.

Wisse does complicate the present-day issue of Israel-Palestine relations, finding that the Jews mistakenly expected that possessing liberal democratic sovereignty would effectively mean the end of anti-Semitism. She references the mid-twentieth-century Jewish fantasy embodied in the character of Reschid Bey in Theodor Herzl's Altneuland; the character, an "Arab created in the image of a Jew" (165), is grateful that the Jews rescued the Arabs from a life of poverty. What actually happens in the decades after the founding of the state of Israel is that because of the Arab resentment that utopians like Herzl should have predicted, the Jewish state's political power must instead be supplanted by its military power.

Unfortunately, Wisse doesn't do enough (in my view) to critique this form of military power, constructing her argument so that it would seem that militarism was the only way for Israel to go. She's seemingly not bothered by Golda Meir's statement to Anwar Sadat: "We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours" (156); I thought that the extremely disconcerting implications behind this statement would have been worth further exploration.

All in all, Jews and Power offers a well-written political history of the Jewish people, with some interesting insights into the ways in which the advent of liberal democracy led to both new freedoms and new forms of anti-Semitism. Ultimately, however, it does not do enough to question all forms of violence (especially that of the 'eye for an eye' variety) and to suggest that there might be a yet-to-be-discovered "middle ground" in terms of Israeli politics.

I picked Betraying Spinoza up after hearing author Rebecca Goldstein talk at last week's Nextbook: Jews and Power conference. Goldstein briefly discussed the challenges inherent in writing a "Jewish" Spinoza biography and focused mainly on her personal narrative of encountering Spinoza as a high school student at an Orthodox Jewish Bais Yaakov school. Despite my distrust of personal narrative, I decided that the book was worth a read.

What Goldstein offers is far more than a personal narrative of her experience as a young Orthodox woman hearing the story of Baruch Spinoza's excommunication from Amsterdam's Portuguese Jewish community due to his insistence on reason over superstition, being told that Jews should avoid Spinoza, who asked questions that he shouldn't have asked. She presents a captivating speculative biography (though, in my view, she doesn't do enough to announce that the bio is speculative) of the philosopher, deriving her narrative of Spinoza's life from historical documents describing seventeenth-century Amsterdam and Spinoza's own work. Perhaps most interesting are the moments when Goldstein subtly analogizes the Dutch Jewish community headed up by Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira to the post-Holocaust religious Jewish community in the 20th and 21st century: severe unthinkable trauma, she suggests, led to three possibilities for people in the community: "fierce religiosity, messianic and mystical," "disappointment, disillusion, attempts to argue with the rabbis about what true Judaism ought to be," and "ultimate rejection and a return to Christianity," to which many had converted when the Inquisition came to Portugal a generation earlier (120-121).

Interestingly, Goldstein argues against her high school teacher's assertion that Spinoza was an atheist simply because he believed in reason over superstition and because he claims in his Ethics that one is naturally inclined to preserve oneself before anyone else. (No wonder this work led, via Locke, to some of the ideas on which America was founded ...) Reading Spinoza's ethics of love, Goldstein seems to find a frustrating God in his work: "He who loves God cannot endeavor that God will love him in return" (237). The mistake made by "superstitious" religions is that they carry on as though God were a tyrant, requiring believers to act in certain ways in order to earn his love.

Another important strength of the book was Goldstein's ability to explain relatively complicated philosophical ideas to a general audience, especially in relation to what she labels the "if-is" gap (a gap that, she notes, Spinoza closes up). This book could conceivably be used, therefore, as a "way in" to Spinoza for students.

In sum, read it.

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!

Jews and Power: A Nextbook Festival of Ideas, May 18th in NYC.

I plan to attend the Culture, Taste, and Power and Authority and Revolt panels, as long as I can get in (it's first come, first served). This definitely sounds like an exciting event.

::breathes fresh air::

Where is Jewish intellectualism now?

Why can't we ask questions about the Israeli military's "eye for an eye" policy, about the insistence that one must believe in God to be a Jew, about the idea that Jews should only marry each other even if more and more genetic illnesses arise, about why New Yorkers complain about the occasionally anti-Semitic graffiti tag while there are still genocides going on elsewhere in the world, without being accused of being self-hating anti-Semites ourselves?

I'm not answering these questions. I'm just wondering why we can't be open to more debates about a variety of issues -- lively, informed debate -- instead of screaming anti-Semitism. Where's the thinking? Why have young Jewish people forgotten that many of their grandparents and great-grandparents' generation were atheist socialists? Why are young people emerging after four years of college, something that many of their grandparents didn't have, unable to ask questions?

Why can't we scratch our heads when the Haggadah says we should recline like masters now because we were once slaves in Egypt, as though those are the only two options? Why can't we talk about the chill that runs through our spines when the Haggadah tells us to thank God for taking the Egyptians' property and giving it to the Jews, and then to thank him again for killing our enemies' firstborn (even if they were infants!) sons? Why can't we point out what's off about these mythology-based political statements?

Israel is a beautiful country. I understand why Israel had to happen; I understand why Jews in the 1940s needed to know that they had a homeland to turn to. I can't wait until the next time I get to eat falafel and read a book on the beach in Tel Aviv and admire some ancient ruins while finding discarded plastic spoons in them. But as American Jews, we need to be able to feel free to ask questions and to openly discuss some of the reasons why we might not be able to idealize Israel and its every political and military move. And we don't. I know that were I to make these statements in a less-anonymous forum, I'd be shouted at rather than argued with, accused of siding with the enemy.

Jewish intellectuals of a previous generation knew that fascism wasn't just about oppressive governments suddenly rising to power; it was about people carefully 'forgetting' the personhood of those who frighten them. So why not ask a question or a hundred about prayer, God, politics, personhood, history? May critique and debate spring eternal ...

The Carnivalesque Jewish holiday of Purim begins tonight, and, yes. it is a mitzvah to get drunk on Purim.

It's one of those situations where Carnival serves an ultimately conservative purpose, though, because the costumes and cookies are all about hiddenness, where we're supposed to remember that God's hand is in everything, and that even when it seems that he's not there, he's responsible for all our successes. (Note that we're always responsible for our own failures, and that we're not supposed to take failures and tragic events to mean that God is crapping on us. Impeccable logic.)

Wait, I promised you a funny Purim story, not an atheist rant.

When I was in the first grade, my Sunday school teacher used a slideshow to teach us about the story of Purim. (Yes, kinderlekh, there was no such thing as PowerPoint in 1985.) The first part of the story, as it's sanitized for children, tells of King Ahashueros banishing Queen Vashti from his Persian kingdom (what actually happens in the Megillah: he beheads her) and holding a "costume contest" for all the young women in town in order to decide who his next queen will be (in the Megillah: King A. doesn't "judge" them by their, uh, costumes). According to the bowdlerized story, the beautiful Esther was the only woman who didn't show up dressed in costume, and the king immediately fell in love.

One slide in the slideshow consisted of King Ahashueros sitting on his throne, looking out at the line of eager women hoping to be queen. Esther was amongst them, in a lovely pink dress. The woman in front of Ahashueros -- one of many who could never compete with Esther -- was dressed as a potato.

A potato.

That day, I believe we learned the following lesson: if she's going to marry a Very Important Man, a Jewish woman must never, ever look like a potato.

Ha'aretz reports that nine students at an Orthodox Jewish girls' high school in London refused to answer questions about The Tempest on a national exam in protest of the fact that Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice.

No, not in protest of their being made to read Merchant. They weren't.
Not in protest of any high school students being made to read Merchant. It was part of neither the curriculum nor the test.

The editorial in Ha'aretz rightly expresses concern that the girls' parents and school principal are supporting their "protest," where "instead of embodying the very Jewish virtues of academic inquisitiveness, and a thirst for knowledge, [the principal] has given his tacit approval to a dangerously blinkered approach."

These girls haven't read the play. Had they read it, they would have seen that it's hardly anti-Semitic; the Shylock plot is basically about a father who is outraged that his only daughter left his house, stole his money, sold her dead mother's ring for a monkey, and converted to Christianity. Had they read the play, they might have noticed that early on, the "flesh bond" is just a joke of sorts between Shylock and Antonio. Shylock only demands to collect a pound of flesh when his "flesh and blood," his daughter Jessica, leaves him. He's an outraged father who has endured years of oppression at the hands of the Venetian Christians.

And, by the way, early 20th-century Jews, especially those involved in the Yiddish theater, adored Shylock. From Jacob Adler to Avrom Morevski to Maurice Schwartz, Yiddish actors and writers were never afraid to sympathize with Shylock. There is also available a translation of the Hebrew novel on which Schwartz's Shylock play is based; if you're interested in the Jewish reception of Merchant, it's definitely worth checking out.

(Hat tip to Shakespeare Geek for the "protest" story.)

Title of a lecture being given at a NYC synagogue: "God is Not Great But Neither are We (a Response to Christopher Hitchens)."

They're a very welcoming congregation, but the above title suggests that they may not understand atheism well enough not to drive away atheists who still want to participate in Jewish culture.

During my weekly scan for all things Shakespeare on the WWW, I came across a "God created the earth because the Torah says so" article that not only aligns creationists with "evolutionists" on the basis of what the author calls a " 'something from something' orthodoxy" but also invokes Shakespeare to explain a Torah-based "something from nothing" principle.

Chasidic readings of Torah are often rather poetic and profound (though in my view, of course, not objectively 'true'). Except here, the essay writer seems to base his understanding of both God and Shakespeare on a Romantic/Freudian view of author-as-creator.

After explaining the ways in which God thinks the world into existence, the essayist turns to Shakespeare's 'writing process' as a means of explaining this abstract concept:

"Shakespeare dreamt up King Lear. In order to get King Lear where Shakespeare wanted him, namely as a foolish old man, Shakespeare did not have to imagine his birth, weaning, adolescence, and middle years. Shakespeare's King Lear is not the product of a series of somethings, e.g., an indulgent, permissive mother, poor social skills as a teenager, and so on. Rather, he is the product of nothing: Shakespeare's unfettered creative intellect."

King Lear is not "the product of nothing": his story comes from Holinshed's Chronicles. While the play's fully fleshed-out subplot was quite an innovation at the time, the subplot's story is borrowed from Sidney's Arcadia. Yes, Shakespeare did not have to imagine Lear's childhood (as some writers and actors might be encouraged to do with their characters today), but he is surely not a product of "Shakespeare's unfettered creative intellect." He is a product of Shakespeare's carefully stitching together previous work; he is a product of the work of actors and theater managers. Contrary to what the (highly entertaining) film Shakespeare in Love suggests, Shakespeare did not pull his story ideas and characters out of the ether, from "nothing."

Which gets me wondering: was there an equivalent to "creationism" in the Early Modern Era, prior to the emergence of the notion of individualist "creativity"? What would God-as-creator have meant to the Early Moderns?

Aish HaTorah, an orthodox Jewish kiruv (outreach) organization, offers a critique of a NY Times Magazine article published last summer, in which Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman discussed how he was ostracized by the Orthodox Jewish community because he married a non-Jew. Aish's article asks some uncomfortable questions that seem to suggest that Jews who intermarry should be loved-yet-ostracized:

"Is there ever any line that is crossed that calls for communal condemnation? Does tolerance have its limits? Even if as Jews we strongly believe in the potential for every Jew, no matter how far removed, to become proactively engaged in Judaism, is there not a time that we have to make clear we abhor the act although we still love the sinner?"

Aish's response to the Feldman article then gets into the rhetoric of preservation, a sentiment also expressed in the following statement from the organization: "The Jewish people are currently experiencing a spiritual Holocaust. That is why Aish HaTorah stands at the front of the battle against rampant assimilation and intermarriage."

Meanwhile, in an essay on Chabad.org, Sarah Esther Crispe (editor of Chabad's TheJewishWoman.org, who incidentally has a lovely writing style) recounts her thoughts upon receiving an invitation to a cousin's wedding; though she is close with this cousin, she chooses not to attend because Jewish bride's groom is Catholic. The way in which Crispe invokes the Holocaust in justifying her decision to snub this friend and relative is actually heartbreaking.

Heartbreaking, because Jewish assimilation and intermarriage neither caused nor perpetuated the Holocaust. The Holocaust was caused by (1) fascism, and (2) racism.

I'll leave it at that.