In many colleges and universities, courses regularly meet either on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays or else on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you are teaching a Tuesday – Thursday course, then since this is Thursday, your course would next meet on election day, assuming classes are not canceled on that day. That's not too long a wait, is it?
Now to be sure, Susie and I once went to Paris for the spread between a Thursday class and a Tuesday class. What happened was this: I flew all the way to Australia to watch Patrick play in the World Junior Chess Championship. (I changed planes in Los Angeles and walked past a bar where a television set was showing the debate between Lloyd Benson And Dan Quayle in which Benson got off the classic line "I knew Jack Kennedy, Senator, and you are no Jack Kennedy".) The airline was having a triple frequent flyer miles special and I picked up so many frequent flyer miles that I could take Susie and me to Paris but the restrictions on when I could use it were so severe that we finally decided to use up the miles by leaving for Paris after my Thursday class, spending the weekend in Paris, and returning in time for my Tuesday class. So the spread between the Thursday class and the Tuesday class is not nothing but still, I am sure I can last that long.
Joe Biden and Barack Obama are scheduled to be in Michigan on Saturday, presumably in Detroit. The venue has not been announced. I would very much like to attend the rally. However, the last presidential rally I attended was the night before the 2000 election, in Ann Arbor, to see Al Gore. I attended with my five year-old daughter astride my shoulders. It was a wonderful rally and Gore gave a great rousing speech. We all know what happened the next day. Should I avoid attending the rally in Detroit on Saturday, just in case I might jinx the election?
ReplyDeleteI'll issue a pass allowing you to go provided that, this time, you don't put your daughter astride your shoulders.
ReplyDeleteDavid,
ReplyDeleteHa, Ha. Very funny! Actually, she is very petite – only 5 ft., 1 inch, and about 110 lbs. It would be doable. But I am sure she would object, preferring that her boyfriend did the honors. The disappointments that come with the passage of time. “They flee from me that once did me seek ...”
I took some liberties with Sir Wyatt’s superb poem. And now reflecting on the suggestion of incest in what I wrote, I must make a retraction. My daughter would be appalled.
ReplyDeleteSince Sir Thomas was an English knight, hence his title, it is inappropriate to refer to him as "Sir Wyatt." It is proper to refer to him as Sir Thomas, and if you think the reference might be misunderstood it would be proper to refer to him as Sir Thomas Wyatt. But definitely not Sir Wyatt.
ReplyDeleteJust to complicate things had he been a lord of some sort and not just a knight, depending on his actual place in the hierarchy of titles and depending on why you were talking to/about him, it might have been proper to refer to him as Lord Wyatt, Lord Thomas, Lord Thomas Wyatt. But since he was only a knight none of this pertains.
The scope of the abstruse knowledge possessed by the readers of this blog is truly amazing. So, did all of the knights have surnames, but were only referred to by their first names? We know Sir Lancelot was Lancelot du Lake, but what about Sir Galahad? Was his full name Galahad Schwartz?
ReplyDeleteAnd with all the knowledgeable readers of this blog, why can’t I get more responses to my question regarding the likely attitude of Kant towards abortion, and my other question about the epistemological significance of an inability to prove the truth of proposition p and the implications of Nelson Goodman’s argument regarding counterfactuals?
It's hardly abstruse knowledge. It's pretty well known to anyone who has ever attended to British matters or read British novels of a less than contemporary sort. It is even a feature of contemporary British politics since the Labour Party is led by Sir Keir Starmer (may he be damned!!!), so if you wanted to talk about, say, anti-semitism in Britain today, you would inevitably find you had to refer to him, and I hope you would do so appropriately.
ReplyDeleteWrt your question, it is seemingly the case--I've certainly encountered it elsewhere--that abstruse topics generate fewer responses than those which touch on common knowledge. I suppose another answer might be that it's not your blog. But I have detected thaat Prof. Wolff encounters a similar problem when it comes to eliciting comments on technical philosophical matters, so I guess I'll stick with the common knowledge vs. specialist knowledge explanation.
Dukakis's running mate was Bentsen, not Benson.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous,
ReplyDeleteThis comment thread is going a bit astray from Prof. Wolff’s original post, but I am not sure what you are referring to regarding anti-Semitism in Great Britain today. While I am not particularly conversant regarding contemporary British politics, I am aware that Sir Keir’s wife is Jewish and they are raising their children Jewish, and that he has condemned the anti-Semitic remarks that his predecessor,. Mr. Corbyn. was known to have made. So I am uncertain what precisely you are getting at when you exclaim “may he [Sturmer] be damned” and caution me to refer to the subject “appropriately.”
"he has condemned the anti-Semitic remarks that his predecessor,. Mr. Corbyn. was known to have made."--aye, there's the rub. If you had been following British Labour politics these last four years and if you'd looked beyond the vendetta media you'd appreciate that your assertion respecting what Corbyn has said at any time is, to say the least, subject to much question. The exchanges over antisemitism within the Labour Party can be reviewed here:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/
The most recent entry is here:
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/statement/the-ehrc-report-an-interim-response/
What is certainly the case, whatever view one takes of these controversies, is that they are very much bound up with a bitter internal contest within the Labour Party, that, in my opinion, being the dominant factor.
Although the following comes from one particular leftwing newspaper, I can assure you that it expresses very widespread views on the British left regarding Starmer having just suspended Corbyn from the Party:
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/jeremy-corbyns-suspension-declaration-war
For Americans, the parallel would be: imagine the vilification and the attempt to politically destroy him had Sanders become the titular head of the Democratic Party; imagine that that project to reclaim the Party had succeeded; and imagine then that the new leadership proceeded to try to eliminate from the Party's ranks "the Squad," etc.
For my money, Starmer is a combination of Tony Blair and Stalin in his style of trying to ensure that the British Labour Party included only those who will slavishly accept his leadership.
I hope this explains my previous words.
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteAye, there’s the rub. I am actually, contrary to what you may believe, quite familiar with this issue, because I am in fact currently litigating a lawsuit in federal court directly related to this issue. And while I do not automatically equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, and am myself critical of some of Israel’s policies, such criticism, and professions of anti-Zionism, do , in my opinion, often cross the line into anti-Semitism. This is much too complicated a subject to deal with adequately in the comment space available on Prof. Wolff’s blog, but I do believe that many of the comments uttered by Mr. Corbyn did in fact cross that line, and I congratulate Sir Keir for having condemned them. And, by the way, your comparison to Senator Sanders is inapposite, because Senator Sanders is himself Jewish.
I agree, this isn't the place to explore this issue further. Suffice it to say, I think you are woefully mistaken respecting both Corbyn and Starmer. As to Sanders being Jewish, their Jewishness has not stopped a good number of Labour Party members from being accused of antisemitism and their suspension or dismissal from the Party. Again as to Sanders, I could if I had the time and the energy come up with sources touching on the possibility that charges of antisemitism might be directed against him as part of the parallel contest that has gone on within the Democratic Party. In other words, nothing inapposite about my comparison, I think. Anyway, take a look at my references.
ReplyDeleteI was fully familiar with the articles you cited, and others, before you cited them. What I am wondering, however, is why you targeted me for my gross dereliction of referring to Sir Thomas Wyatt as simply Sir Wyatt?
ReplyDeleteI didn't target you. That sounds a wee bit paranoid, don't you think.? I was simply correcting your usage of a little bit of British terminology with which you seemed to be unfamiliar. You sound awfully defensive on the other matter too. I guess you need to have the last word, so I won't respond again.
ReplyDeleteYou are obviously a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, which is enough for me to question your motives. When Raed Salah says that Jews kill Christian children to drink their blood, a repeat of the centuries old blood libel which cost the lives of thousands of Jews, and Corbyn invites Salah for tea at the House of Commons, I have reason to believe that Corbyn is an Anti-semite, despite his repeated denials. And when he sides with members of the Labour Party who compare Zionists and Israelis to Nazis, I have reason to believe that he is an Anti-semite, despite his denials. And when someone who believes Corbyn has been wronged by the findings of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission that concluded that Corbyn had encouraged Anti-semitic views within the Party, and denounces Sir Keir Starmer (“may he be damned”) for his condemnation of Corbyn’s history of Anti-semitism, then yes, I question that individual’s motives for wanting to simply correct my usage of a little bit of British terminology because I was rude enough to refer to Sir Thomas Wyatt as simply Sir Wyatt – when in a previous comment I revealed that my first wife was the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, making it quite likely that I am Jewish. And I don’t regard that as paranoia, I regard it as recognizing an Anti-semite for what s/he is. And that is my last word.
ReplyDeleteIn actual response to Prof. Wolff's post, I thought it was universally acknowledged that, subjectively, time moved more rapidly the more we aged. From your perspective, having seen more than eight decades of winters, I would expect a time period equivalent to a 3-day weekend (as I type this comment) would just fly by.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who has seen almost eight decades of seasons roll by, I can attest to this. But there also seems to be a weird subjective paradox: time can sometimes seem to move slowly but then it's gone before you know it. How such a thing is possible at all, I cannot even hazard a guess, but it does seem to be a "real" experience.
I understand that you wanted to support your son and I understand that you wanted to have a nice time in Paris. And I even understand what you mean when you say there were restrictions on when you could use your accumulated frequent flyer miles. But shouldn’t other restrictions besides those set by the airlines apply? I’m thinking of your carbon footprint.
ReplyDeleteStill, I’m awed by your capacity to cross the Atlantic for a weekend and teach at either end of that. After driving to and from classes across too many miles in a midwestern state, the weekends always seemed so ridiculously short. Never enough time. Never enough time.
For those of us who don't follow British politics closely at all, maybe someone who does can explain what accusations of anti-semitism involving Jeremy Corbyn are about. Yes, I know who Corbyn is and that's he's more leftwing than Blair, but not much more. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteStephen,
ReplyDeleteIt is obvious from my comment above that I am not a neutral observer regarding this issue, so you may be disinclined to accept what I have to offer on the matter. I do not wish to appear to be hijacking Prof. Wolff’s blog in order to discuss Jeremy Corbyn’s history of anti-Semitism in the eyes of a significant segment of British Jewry, so I will keep this comment short. As you can guess, a good part of the issue revolves around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the views by many on the political left - views that, recalling some of your past comments, I believe you share - that Israel has become an oppressor of the Palestinian people. But it has gone beyond that, because many of Corbyn’s supporters have resorted to invoking centuries old tropes about Jewish international influence in banking, domination of the media, etc., statements which Corbyn has not condemned, at the same time that he has insisted he is not anti-Semitic. For a brief summary of these issues, see https://www.thejlc.org/letter_to_jeremy_corbyn. A recent report by The Equality and Human Rights Commission concluded that Corbyn was responsible for “political interference” into investigations of anti-Semitism complaints regarding the Labour Party. As a result, he was expelled from the Party, and his successor as head of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer, excoriated Corbyn for his history of tolerating anti-Semitism, which has expressed itself in ways unrelated to the Israeili-Palestinian conflict. This has resulted in the wrath of Corbyn’s supporters being directed at Sir Keir (making sure that I do not repeat my past indiscretion of improperly referring to a knight), such as Anonymous, above. Regarding the history of anti-Semitism in general, and how it has morphed into criticism of Israel, I recommend watching the following video by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UAcYn4uUbs.
@ Anonymous (October 29 at 8:36 PM and other comments)
ReplyDeleteTo libel left-wing politicians as anti-Semites is as widespread as it is old. It's a favourite weapon of both right-wingers and their centrist cousins.
Against MS's [ignorant? disingenuous?] objection, the fact the targets of the libel are often Jewish has not spared them the libel.
Karl Marx for example. Jonathan Freedland's hackery on that is the stuff of legend.
I believe it was S. Wallerstein who remarked at the time that if Marx really had anti-Jewish feelings, the most one could say is that he was a self-hating Jew. For, in Judaism, children inherit their mother's Jewishness. And Marx's granny was Jewish, as was his mom.
So, we have that centrists like Freedland accuse Marx of being anti-Semitic while genuine anti-Semites like the Fuehrer could not mention Marx's name without prefixing it with "Jew", as in "the Jew Karl Marx": damned if you do, damned if you don't.
And although that libel has been used extensively and to devastating effect in the UK against Jeremy Corbyn and more recently against Rebecca Long-Bailey (who just so happened to be Starmer's rival for the Labour Party leadership), American centrists of MS's ilk and right-wingers have deployed it against those to their left.
Bernie Sanders was one such target (yes, MS, Bernie).
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/18/the-rights-accusations-of-antisemitism-against-sanders-are-cynical-and-dangerous
Representative Ilhan Omar (a black Muslim woman of Somali origin) has also been targeted as anti-Semite. Who labelled her such? Among others, Don Junior and Bill De Blasio! A torrent of abuse fell upon her, with everybody's blessings. One could expect the fact she was black, Muslim, woman and of foreign origin would not gain her any sympathies from Don Junior. The thing is, it did not move her centrist critics either.
Her sin? Vox's Zack Beauchamp sums it up:
"In full context, Omar doesn’t explicitly identify who or what this “political influence” [of an influential pro-Israel lobby in the US, gasp] is coming from other than the pro-Israel lobbying community in general."
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/6/18251639/ilhan-omar-israel-anti-semitism-jews
Beauchamp then adds that "yet Omar also has vocal defenders in both the Democratic Party and the broader left-progressive community, including some prominent Jewish leftists."
=======
The point is that for MS the falsehood or otherwise behind the accusation is immaterial. Whatever the case, the idea is to sling mud, in the hope some of it sticks. It's called character assassination.
Other than the targets themselves, you know who will be the most likely victims of MS's dishonesty?
Jews themselves.
The recently deceased David Graeber understood that very well:
For the first time in my life, I'm frightened to be Jewish
And non-Jews attacking the Labour party aren't helping.
By David Graeber (6 September 2019)
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/first-time-my-life-im-frightened-be-jewish/
The immaculately pure feelings of centrists like MS is suspicious: right-wingers and centrists have a way to find a sensible middle ground (ask the Nazis and the German Social Democrats in the early 20th century).
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteI am not going to waste my time, or the comment space on Prof. Wolff’s blog, to debunk all of the nonsense you have written above. I at no point accused those on the political left who view Israel as the oppressor of the Palestinians as being, for that reason, anti-Semitic. I do not agree with all of this criticism, but I have indicated that I also am critical of some of Israel’s policies, and I am not anti-Semitic. Regarding Corbyn’s anti-Semitism, it is not related exclusively to his anti-Zionist comments, but to his tolerance of age-old anti-Semitic slurs such as the blood libel and claims by some of his Labour Party supporters that have portrayed Jews as controlling the world economy and international politics. Regarding my political affiliation, I regard myself as a liberal, not a centrist, and voted for Sanders in my state's primary.
Ok, folks. I would like to direct your attention to a music video by Dumpstaphunk and Trombone Shorty, titled “JUSTICE.” It is worth your time.
ReplyDeletehttps://youtube.be/g4r9RF3a710
Then listen to a song by Tre Burt titled “Under the Devil’s Knee”.
Same theme with differing treatments. The first is New Orleans jazz/funk, the second is folk and both are good.
ENJOY!
Re Anonymous @9:55 p.m.
ReplyDeleteYou say that Marx was Jewish b.c his mother was. But he was also Jewish on his father's side: his grandfather was a rabbi, and his father converted from Judaism to Protestantism b.c Jews were not allowed to practice law in Germany, at least that part of it, in the early C19th, or at least a law was at some point passed that barred them from doing so. (This was well before German unification in 1871, so the different regions/states had their own laws on these matters.) So his father converted in order to practice his profession. In short, Marx was definitely Jewish by ancestry, despite being brought up in a family that had converted to Christianity.
As for whether Marx was anti-Semitic, I believe the charge mainly, though not exclusively, draws on his early essay "On the Jewish Question," which I'm fairly sure I never properly read though I might have started it once or twice, so I'll refrain from comment on it. (There is probably nothing logically or inherently contradictory, however, about being both Jewish and anti-Semitic: the combination is no doubt rare, but I think it's not completely unheard of.)
I will refrain from comment on the more immediate controversy at hand b.c I think enough has been said already and I haven't really followed the matter. In general, I wd say that criticism of Israeli govt policy does not at all equal anti-Semitism, whereas trafficking in things like the blood libel does.
p.s. For the record, I posted the above before seeing Anonymous's comment @10:56 pm.
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it, I'm not sure whether it was Marx's maternal or paternal grandfather who was a rabbi but I'm too tired to look it up (and anyway it's irrelevant here).
ReplyDeleteI know what the word “vermin” means, but I was not familiar with the “stormfront” reference, so I Googled it. “Stormfront” is a white supremacist organization, listed as such by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which states of the organization: “Created by former Alabama Klan boss and long-time white supremacist Don Black in 1995, Stormfront was the first major hate site on the Internet. Claiming more than 300,000 registered members as of May 2015 (though far fewer remain active), the site has been a very popular online forum for white nationalists and other racial extremists.” See https://www.stormfront.org/forum/
ReplyDeleteSo now, according to Anonymous, I am not only a centrist hypocrite who has scurrilously accused Jeremy Corbyn of being an anti-Semite, I am a white supremacist adherent. As Rabbi Sacks points out in the link I referenced in a prior comment, one of the signatures of anti-Semtism is making contradictory accusations about Jews, so that they are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. Regarding Anonymous’ ideology. who admits to being a fervent supporter of Corbyn, I will leave it to the readers of this blog to reach their own conclusions.
I’d be happy to comply with your request, s.w., but I’m reluctant to impose on this blog and its host. Also, as happened above the discussion of anti-semitism in the British Labour Party can often lead to quite intemperate responses, including not so veiled accusations of anti-semitism through guilt by association. I also want to make clear that the Anonymous who said some things at 9:55 and 10:56 PM was not me, though I welcome his polemical and pretty accurate intervention—sometimes there is a need for harsh words, though I usually try to avoid them. The virtue of these passionate words, including those rather inappropraite ones MS previously directed at me, is that they do, in fact, give some indication of the crudity and viciousness of the debate that has been raging in and about the Labour Party since 2015. That said, I’d point you to the references I previously suggested. If you load up more of what’s at the JVL site you’ll eventually come upon a video presentation by the anthropolgist David Graeber (who, sadly, recently passed away). Chomsky has also commented on the matter—I don’t have the reference to hand, but it should be readily discoverable. Nevertheless, since you did ask a serious question, s.w., I am going to try to give you some larger sense, beyond the polemical, as to what is going on in British Labour.
ReplyDeleteFor myself, I’d offer that it’s impossible to understand what has been tearing the British Labour Party apart since 2015 without understanding that the basic problem arises from the fact that the extra-parliamentary Party has both increased enormously in membership and had been much more inclined to respond quite radically to the economic consequences of the collapse of 2008-9. Unlike the majority in the Parliamentary part of the Party, the extra-parliamentary Labourites have been much more outraged by austerity and by the ongoing wars, especially the assault on Iraq. The Labour M.P.s and the Labour Party bureaucracy, in large part, I think, because they were recruited under the aegis of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, i.e., recruited to part of their New Labour project took a very different approach to these matters. This isn’t to say that the divisions within Labour began in the 1990s. In fact, they go back to the Party’s earliest days, as Ralph Miliband discussed in his critique of “Parliamentary Socialism,” where he argued that it was a forlorn hope that the Labour party would ever bring socialism to Britain. But the tension between the socialist aspirations of some few in Parliament and a great many outside Parliament became much more intense in this century. Things would likely have continued in their usual tension-ridden way but for the fact that when Ed Miliband, son of Ralph, but with quite different politics, became the Party leader he managed to change the rules for the selection/election of future leaders. I doubt he intended it, but the outcome was that when he resigned after losing an election, the new rules allowed the extra-Parliamentary Labourites a much larrger role than they’d previously enjoyed. And they exploited this new more democratic capacity to influence the Party to make Jeremy Corbyn leader. But he found himself surrounded in Parliament by those who bitterly opposed the political currents so widespread outside Parliament and who resented that the leadership had, to their horror, been removed from politicians like themselves. From that moment they launched a bitter struggle against Corbyn and his supporeters within Parliament and in the Party at large.
TO BE CONTINUED
CONTINUED
ReplyDeleteIt’s at this point that it becomes necessary to turn to another context of struggle which has become quite bitter and distasteful in some respects. It will surely be known to those who have any contact, intimate, as mine are, or more distant, that there has emerged in recent years, for reasons which have nothing to do with the Labour Party or Britain more generally, but which have much to do with Israel and with the fact that a great many Jews have diminished their heretofore strong support for that country. There have been reports in the NYT on several occasions, that younger Jews are turning away from Israel. There are organizations like J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace. And there’s the boycott movement in which some prominent parts are played by Jews. And these various organizations/movements have excited responses.
What has all this to do with Jeremy Corbyn and his attempt to make the British Labour Party more democratically responsive to its membership and their needs, hopes, and fears, one might well ask. To cut a long story short, and no doubt because the charge of anti-semitism is a very potent and upsetting one, charging the Corbyn wing of the Labour Party and Corbyn himself with being anti-semitic quickly began to be used very effectively to disrupt and contain the Corbyn movement within the Party. It quickly gained legs, so to speak. Yetr every study of social-scientific study of anti-semitism within Britain and within the Labour Party, and there have been several, have concluded (a) that anti-semitism is lower in Britain than in any other European country, and (b) that members of the Labour Party are less likely than the adherents of any other British political party to be anti-semitic. This, to be clear, is not a claim that it doesn’t exist. Regrettably it does—and as Corbyn himself has said, even one case of anti-semitism is unacceptable.
So here we have a party under new leadership but still trammeled with a bureaucratic apparatus that is fileed with those who want to get rid of him. And here we have this emotionally potent weapon being directed against him and his supporters. And again to be clear, it was not the Corbynites who were bureaucratically positioned to deal with the complaints of anti-semitism on the part of Party members—the relatively few complaints, as it happens, quite a number of them directed against Jews who were no longer supportive of Israel, and many of them mentioning people who were not even Party members—it was Corbyn’s opponents who were supposed to deal with these complaints. And they foot dragged and foot dragged until eventually their time ran out and they were replaced via the Party’s constituional arrangements. At which point the process of handling the complaints pcked up—this being done by Corbyn’s supporters now in the bureaucracy. But the issue wasn’t dropped. It kept on rolling and it has kept on rolling. As I said, it has proved too potent a weapon against Corbyn and the left. But in my opinion, it has very little to do with an actual concern to deal with anti-semitism.
I hope that helps you begin to come to grips with the matter, s.w. And I hope I have shown that, despite the fact that it is an emotionally laden and difficult problem, it is both necessary and possible to analyse what has been going on without engaging in character assassination or vileness.
Getting back to Professor Wolff's observation regarding the typical MWF or TUTH schedule of university classes, I happen to be teaching on Tuesdays and Thursdays this term. We are all teaching remotely, of course. In an effort to afford as many members of the university community as possible the opportunity to vote on Tuesday, the university has issued a policy that they will be closing at 2:00 PM on November 3rd. Since I have already voted, I do not need the time off. However, I want to be sure that my students have the time and opportunity to vote if they plan to go to the polls on election day. I posted a survey for students to select a preference for sticking to the original class time or opt for one of four alternate "make-up" possibility times. At last check, voting is trending roughly 70% in favor of sticking to the originally scheduled class time. Is this a good, bad, or neutral sign?
ReplyDeleteOn an altogether different note, PhilosophicalWaiter has made another astute remark -- this time regarding perceptions about the passage of time. An oft repeated quote of mine I borrow from the Zippy comic strip writer Bill Griffith: "The years are not whipping by any slower." Nevertheless, I have found that these last four years have passed slower that usual. Since COVID, time seems to have slackened even more. As of this moment, the time between now and Tuesday feels like an eternity. If possible, I would go on Soma holiday right now and wake up on Wednesday morning to soldier on. Since that option is out of the question, time continues to crawl while anxiety runs high. Oh well, in the meantime I am hoping for the best while girding for the worst.
I appreciate that this thread has taken a detour that most of the blog’s readers are not interested in. Lest I be accused of having hijacked Prof. Wolff’s original blog post by diverting it to an irrelevant discussion of anti-Semitism in the British Labour Party, let me point out that with regard to the original post’s reference to dealing with the stress of waiting until the results of the upcoming election on Tuesday and ways to deal with the tension, I indicated that I intended to attend a Biden/Obama rally scheduled in Detroit today. I then reminisced about the last time I attended a live election rally and made reference to the poem “They Flee From Me,” by Sir Thomas Wyatt, which I shortened, apparently incorrectly, to Sir Wyatt. The original Anonymous corrected me for my lapse in protocol, and then, out of the blue, stated: “It is even a feature of contemporary British politics since the Labour Party is led by Sir Keir Starmer (may he be damned!!!), so if you wanted to talk about, say, anti-semitism in Britain today, you would inevitably find you had to refer to him, and I hope you would do so appropriately.” Where did this come from? I had not raised the issue of charges of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, and why should Corbyn’s successor, who criticized Corbyn for not having dealt effectively with the infestation of anti-Semtisim in the Labour Party, “be damned”? I did not slander the original Anonymous via character assassination and guilt by association. I criticized him based on his own words, condemning Sir Keir for his efforts to expunge anti-Semitism from the Labour Party.
ReplyDeleteI will end my participation in this discursion from Prof. Wollf’s original post to note that the original Anonymous, in his most recent contribution, has sugar-coated the issue of claims that Corbyn was complicit in the Labour Party’s infiltration by anti-Semites. See
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/labour-mp-ruth-smeeth-storms-out-of-antisemitism-report-launch-a3285106.html
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/06/jewish-labour-mp-ruth-smeeth-was-reduced-tears-labou
First of all, I want to thank everyone for responding to my question above.
ReplyDeleteSecond, I do not recall calling Marx "a self-hating Jew" as one Anonymous claims above, although I don't deny I might have at some point. I say lots of stupid things. Calling Marx a "self-hating Jew" seems inappropriate or anachronic to me since Marx believed that religions like Judaism and cultural tribes like the Jewish one would be homogenized by capitalism and that under socialism, culture would be reborn as a free expression of individual or group creativity.
I'm Jewish and I'll briefly outline my position on Israel. They should withdraw to the borders pre-1967 war, including East Jerusalem; the sacred places of Jerusalem should be placed under UN control; Arab Israeli citizens should be granted full civil and political rights within Israel; and Israel should pay reparations to Palestinians whose lands or homes were seized during the 1948 war.
On to Corbyn. I've noticed that anti-semitism, on the left and the right, has come out of the closet in the last few years. Generally, it's anti-semitism of "the Jews control the world" type, assuming some kind of international conspiracy involving Mossad, George Soros (who is Jewish) and at times Bill Gates (who isn't Jewish). I've seen it so often that by now I don't even bother to correct it, I just keep a distance from the person in the future. Yes, everyone says that it's a question of education, but in reality, people need someone to blame their failures and frustrations on and if they don't blame them on the Jews, they'll blame them on China or on Mexican immigrants or on Blacks or on the gay mafia or on Putin. So I'm not hopeful about ending this phenomenon.
Anyway, as far as I can see, no one accuses Corbyn of anti-semitic comments or attitudes or actions. Rather, they accuse him of tolerating anti-semitic comments or actions or attitudes in the Labor Party while he was head of it and of hanging out with people with such comments, attitudes and actions.
If that is true, that is lamentable, although not surprising. Political leaders rarely condemn their party comrades unless there is some kind of rivalry between them.
It's human, all too human. Political leaders attack the other party or rivals within their own party: that's when they unsheathe the sword of moral indignation.
The search for politically incorrect comments or attitudes in Anglo-Saxon cultures has gotten a bit suffocating in my opinion and that includes the search for anti-semitic as well as sexist and racist comments and attitudes. It can and does become a leftie witch-hunt.
Finally, it is alleged that Corbyn's political enemies used the accusations, true or false, of anti-semitism to remove him from a leadership position within the Labor Party.
That is also not surprising. Politics is dirty business.
Dear MS, my reference to Starmer wasn’t exactly out of the blue. I was simply trying to give an example of where a contemporary discussion of a current political topic might require one to engage with the arcane British terminologies around knighthood, and British politics always happens to be as much on my mind as the election in the US is on other minds. Remiss of me, I’m sure, to let my hostility to Starmer burst out into the open. And I certainly didn’t want to start this blog thread off down this road. But once you responded as you did to my further attempt at an explanation of things I am very deeply concerned about, . . .
ReplyDeleteFinally I hope you’ll accept that the references you direct us to are part of the whole very tendentious debate that has been raging in Britain, a debate in which the media, including the supposedly left-oriented Guardian and the New Statesman and the supposedly neutral BBC, have played a very unfortunate part. The Smeeth references are part of all that.
Wrt s. wallerstein’s response which contains much that I agree with, as I see it he hits on precisely the point, the crucial absent link, in my argument above, something I neglected in my haste and in my attempt to be brief. For it is, indeed, the sympathy of Jews like himself for the Palestinians, a sympathy that is widespread among Jews and non-Jews on the British Labour left that ran afoul of the long-standing sympathy for Israel also widespread in British Labour. It was that clash, I think, which came to be seen by others with other oxen to gore as a useful weapon. (Antony Lerman has some very wise words to say on “the new antisemitism” and British Labour at OpenDemocracy.net.)
It, i.e., the bitter argument respecting anti-semitism, is, to be sure, only one of the things now destroying the British Labour Party. But even that is only a small thing, I suppose, given that Britain as a whole is self-destructing, a failing state that will before very long, or so it now appears, cease to be a state. For someone of my origins and age, “This thought is as a death which cannot choose but weep” .
The Original Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteAlthough I appreciate your patriotic concerns for the survival of Great Britain, the land that produced the Great Bard whose words you invoke, and to which Western Civilization owes a great debt of gratitude, I believe your obituary is highly premature, for the nation that survived the Hundred Years War, the Great English Civil War, the loss of the thirteen colonies, the Napoleonic Wars, the losses buried in Flanders Fields, where ignorant armies clashed by night, and the aerial bombings by the Third Reich, will surely survive the corona virus pandemic, Brexit, and the internal strife of the Labour Party, and will never surrender to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
I took him to be referring mostly to the secessionist (if that's the right word) impulses in Scotland and, to a perhaps lesser extent, other constituent parts of the UK. These aren't new, but seem to be stronger than before to a distant observer at any rate.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate MS's attempt to console me, but LFC is right. I don't feel the loss of Tory Britain. But I do feel that a way of being British--a broad commitment to social democracy which transcended the national divisions always present in the United Kingdom created in 1707--is dissolving. Raymond Williams talks about it more comprehensively and feelingly in his "Afterword to 'Modern Tragedy'," but that would lead us very far away.
ReplyDeleteA final word on anti-Semitism, using words not my own. Out of curiosity, I checked to see if Christopher Hitchens, one of the most eloquent writers about things political in my lifetime, and a voice sorely missed, had written anything about anit-Semitism. And sure enough, he had, in words far more profound and discerning than I could ever devise. He wrote about it in an essay for Amor Mundi, titled “Reflections on Antisemitism,” published on December 16, 2011, the day after his untimely death (and which had originally appeared in a collection of essays edited by Hannah Arendt). Here is an excerpt (you can find the entire essay at https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/reflections-on-antisemitism-christopher-hitchens-2011-12-16):
ReplyDelete“This is the situation. Antisemitism is back, and it’s back in quite a big way. It’s being preached with impunity and shown on screens in the United States. In Europe the situation is getting steadily worse. It’s eight hundred percent more likely, according to studies of public opinion, that if you are a Muslim you will report negatively on Jews than if you are a Christian.
“Another way in which racism is totalitarian by nature is the extent to which it claims to explain absolutely everything. Once one knows the key bit of information, as Hofstadter says about the paranoid—the paranoid already has all the information he needs—once one is in possession of the key thing, the secret, in other words, of Jewish world government, then everything is suddenly explicable: how simple it all now seems.
“I humiliated myself a few years ago looking at the list of names of people killed in—I should say murdered in, obliterated in—the World Trade Center. I’d read so many reports, not just from the Middle East, but from Europe too, saying that all the Jews had left the building just before the planes hit. And I thought to myself, “Why am I doing this? This is disgusting to be looking to see if there are Jewish names there.” Something in me made me do it: this is what I’ve been reduced to. And this is what I mean by the toxic nature of prejudice and the way it spreads like a weed. If I had been told that none of the Jews turned up to work that day, I suppose I might possibly have thought, well—it could bear checking. In fact it would be checkable. But millions of people around the world believe something that is literally and figuratively unbelievable—that all the Jews managed to leave just before the planes hit. They believed that the first time they heard it, and still do.
* * *
“However, antisemitism, although it has this anti-intellectual origin, also has a pseudo-intellectual character. Someone who dislikes West Indians, shall we say, or Mexicans, or Haitians, as it might be, is usually expressing a straight-out feeling of superiority over them, and of contempt for their inferiority as a race or an ethnicity. It is the contempt for a lesser breed, usually mingled with disgust over their birth rate, if you listen clearly, and, whether you listen or not, obviously fear of their sexuality. Racism takes grossly physical forms. It talks about the nastiness of their cooking, the way they breed like rabbits, their bathroom habits, the possibility of sleeping with them—this kind of thing. That’s common racial bigotry.
(Continued)
“Antisemitism is not like that. After all, nobody says that people from Chiapas province or from Haiti have a secret plan to take over the stock exchange or Wall Street. Antisemitism is more like a theory, and when you read its productions, you’ll see that certain continuing tropes will occur: gold, the role of gold in history, and the hoarding of it; banking, with the secrecy that banking implies; blood and soil; and the possibility of a Jew being able to conceal himself, to avoid detection. Also, of course, mythology, deicide, and the fact that the Jews were the first to encounter both Jesus of Nazareth and the prophet Muhammad, and to conclude that neither of them was authentic (something for which it is unlikely that they’ll be forgiven by their successor monotheists). To discuss with an anti-Semite is a quite different proposition from discussing with an ordinary, vulgar, racist demagogue. We are talking about either conspiracy theories, or—as I wouldn’t dignify the World Trade Center innuendo even with that sobriquet—fantasy theories, based on the apprehension of something very dark and hidden.
ReplyDelete* * *
“It was Arendt who was one of the first to notice the drift away, by the campus left, from anything resembling classic Marxism. As she was writing her essay ‘On Violence’ in the 1960's, she noted how the left abandoned Marxism for flirtations with the Maoism that taught of political power flowing from a gun barrel, or with the fantasies of Sartre and Fanon on the cleansing qualities of violence, or the heroic qualities of provocations that were designed to elicit backlashes, and, above all, the cult of youth. If you separated them out from their political context and you knew no more about them, they would, taken together, remind you, as they did her, of some of the building blocks and emotions of fascism.
“Let me conclude by saying that I think it may be time to take the temperature of antisemitism again, and to take it seriously. Tis may involve admitting what we might rather not think: that there is something protean and ineradicable about the prejudice. It’s always able to take different forms, and to recur at different times, and in different places, and different idioms and different vernaculars. The most obvious literary analogy for this would be, I propose, the rats in La Peste, Albert Camus’s classic about the plague in Oran, where the plague bacilli, and their carriers, hide themselves and bide their time, always waiting, as Camus says, for another chance to send their rats up to die again in a free city. But wouldn’t it be horrible if that image was not the worst one? The depressing, further thought occurs to me: What if this is also like Arendt’s buried and hidden treasure—the protean treasure that she discusses in ‘Between Past and Present’? What if it’s a will of the wisp and fata morgana—an impalpable thing that can never be netted, identified, pinned down, or diagnosed, let alone cured? What if antisemitism is something that has the power to manifest itself in unpredictable seasons and unexpected places, and is always to elude the work of the mind of the analyst? If that comparison were valid, which I have to say I rather hope it isn’t, we would be looking right down the corridors of our past and uncovering the original scenes of tragedy.”
Sobering words indeed.
I first became aware of how wide-spread the kind of anti-semitism Hitchens describes above are upon hearing conspiracy theories about 9-11 involving Mossad from people whom I had considered as friends and compañeros on the left.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I doubt that an essay which mentions 9-11 appears in a book edited by Hannah Arendt, who died in 1975.
Stephen,
ReplyDeleteGood point. You are correct. I misread the attribution. The book was about Hannah Arendt and included essays written by commentators other than Arendt.
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