The session with the Harvard students was a great success, at least for me. I enjoyed it enormously and out of it came the possibility of an informal study group next semester of faculty and students under my direction to read the entire volume 1 of Capital. That is the ideal situation for me – spend the semester with bright people talking about Marx and no papers to grade😀.
Meanwhile, the world is falling apart and I am so disturbed by it that I cannot sleep well at night.
38 comments:
What's going on in the Middle East is horrible.
Maybe you could be a bit more specific and give us your analysis of what is happening. Thaa would be very welcome.
Friedman has a pretty good column in NYT.
Here is a free (gift) link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/opinion/biden-speech-israel-gaza.html?unlocked_article_code=1.40w.hfI8.TF4KYeNMU3l4&smid=url-share
Key paragraph:
I believe that if Israel rushes headlong into Gaza now to destroy Hamas — and does so without expressing a clear commitment to seek a two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority and end Jewish settlements deep in the West Bank — it will be making a grave mistake that will be devastating for Israeli interests and American interests.
LFC,
Thanks for the free link.
There was an article on the Guardian today how far right fanatics inside Israel are hounding anyone who dares to speak of peace or of respect for the human rights of the Palestinians.
In fact, the Guardian talked of one ultra-orthodox, but pro-peace Jew who and his family are now in hiding from the mobs.
Shakespeare talks in Julius Caesar of "letting slip the dogs of war" and that best sums up what's happening now.
By the way, for anyone who's interested, Javier Milei, the Argentinian Trump did not do as well in the Argentinian election as elected and there will be a run-off between him and
Sergio Massa, the center-left candidate representing the current Peronist government who got more votes than Milei, but not enough to win in the first around. That's encouraging.
sorry, that should read "did not do as well as in the Argentinian election as expected..."
That is good news re the Argentinian election.
Good to hear.
The Venezuela news is a bit encouraging too.
And Poland.
Let me rephrase my question about Israel.
I grew up in and around NYC and Washington DC and nearly all of what I know (or think I “know”) about this place comes from reading about it in the NYT and the NYRB. I can’t be the only person around who pictures Israel as a kind of crustal fragment from the tri-state area that has somehow floated across the ocean and sutured itself to the coast of Asia as an exotic terrane.
Accordingly, I think of Israel as basically made up of two distinct groups. On the one hand, you’ve got my kind of people, the Upper-West-Side-Ethical-Culture-92nd-St-Y crowd; on the other hand you’ve got the Crown-Heights-Meir-Kahane types, who are, let’s say, very much NOT my kind of people.
To extend the analogy, since the Israeli right came to power, there has been a kind of widespread bafflement amount the bien-pensant NYC and DC upper middle classes: How has this happened ... How did a bunch of utterly gauche buffoons end up in charge!?! It’s like waking up one day and discovering that you’re working for your stupid second cousin who twice flunked out of SUNY-Oswego (how the hell do you flunk *Communications*!?!)
All that reading Goethe, listening to chamber music, and going to art galleries, and now I’m taking orders from this moron … it is truly gall and wormwood to the spirit! (I know, I know, that's the New Testament, but you get the idea.)
It seems, in fact, a lot like what happened here in the USA (and which I for one have yet to come to terms with), where a bunch of backwoods Protestants came crawling out of their redoubts in the loblolly piney woods, waving the flag and thumping the Bible … and somehow ended up in charge!
I think that this can’t possibly be an accurate view of the place, but having never been there in person I can’t say how inaccurate it is. So someone please fill me in … Thanks!
John Pillette
Eva Ilouz, French-Israeli sociologist, makes more or less the same point in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv9a5WcL0p0
J.P. you may need to modify your categories a little bit:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/arts/92ny-viet-thanh-nguyen-israel.html?searchResultPosition=1
Huh, I guess I’m some kind of interpretive genius (good to know!). I’ll put Ms. Illouz on my Xmas card list.
W/r/t how this will play out, the consensus seems to be that Netanyahu is “finished”, but I’ll believe that when I see it. It reminds me of circa 2000, when most “everybody” had finally acknowledged that Guliani was a crypto-Fascist. Maybe not even so “crypto”. A few months later and everyone (I mean literally everyone) was praising him to the skies as “America’s Mayor” (gag, barf). It took ANOTHER 20 YEARS to re-arrive at an accurate view of his character.
Otherwise, I'm afraid that dumped my NYT subscription a few years ago (on my dentist's advice: I was grinding my teeth in anger), so you'll have to give me a precis on what's happened on 92nd St if you don't mind.
John Pillette
I have no particular expertise on Israeli society and have been in Israel, as best I can recall (or not recall, as the case may be) only once, briefly, as a child, which is really the equivalent of not having been there at all.
That said, there is obviously more than one fault line, or potential one, in Israeli society. One is between religious and secular Jews, with the ultra-Orthodox as a subset, albeit an increasingly influential one politically. There is a division betw. Jewish Israelis and non-Jewish Palestinian or Arab Israelis, who are citizens, but not treated as first-class citizens in all respects (though I'm not up on all the details). There is also a division betw Israeli Jews of European descent and those of Middle Eastern/N African descent. Then too some are descended from earlier immigrants and some are not (quoting a piece by R. Menon: "In 1922, 11 percent of the population of Palestine was Jewish, versus 3 percent at the end of the nineteenth century; by 1944 it had increased to 30 percent, and the immigration was an important factor in the 1936–1939 Arab rebellion.") Then there are ideological (left/right) divisions (though the Israeli left seems to have weakened somewhat in recent decades), which map onto other divisions no doubt, but maybe not always perfectly. And I'm sure one could get much more granular than this and talk about other groups (e.g., the Druze).
At the same time, Israel's small physical size and population must give its politics and society a somewhat different character that that of the U.S. by virtue of that fact (size) alone. Not to mention v different histories.
In short, while I get where you're coming from, it's prob a little more complex than you suggest. The Anonymous who commented in the other thread, who had spent time there and served as a "noncombatant" (his/her word) in the IDF, cd no doubt give a better answer.
John Pillette, 74 years ago, I took Susie (now my wife) to performances of the Bach Aria group at the 92nd St. Y. As my colleagues in Afro-American studies would have said, I think we are brothers of another mother!
Eva Ilouz, whom I mention above, has written a book on populism (which I haven't read), which takes Netanyahu as her case study.
From what I recall in the video, which I saw some months ago, Israel has a high-tech liberal sector which votes left or center-left and is economically well off and a sector, which has been hit hard by neo-liberal economic policies, which is less educated and is attracted by the populism right, that is, more or less, what has happened in the U.S.
She is talking class and cultural divisions in the Jewish population. She has not studied the Arab population from what I gathered from the video.
Ha ha ha! Maybe in more ways than one … I’ve often reflected on the fact that, had my parents met earlier, I could have been born as early as 1938. As it turned out, I was the last of seven and was born some 30 years later, but I nevertheless managed to inherit a political consciousness formed by the New Deal. This left me out of sync with most of my peers, but not with my other brother-from-another-mother, Bernie Sanders!
J.P.
It’s all pretty much in the site address. The title says a little more:
“92NY Pulls Event With Acclaimed Writer Who Criticized Israel: The decision to call off an event with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen drew criticism that the organization was stifling voices it disagrees with.” (It was news to me, by the way, that it’s no longer the 92nd St Y.)
After the Y cancelled the event—their official claim is that they merely “postponed” it—at almost the last moment, the talk’s organizer, Bernard Schwartz, who leads the Y’s poetry center, moved it to a bookstore in Lower Manhattan where it drew a standing-room crowd of about 100.
Nguyen “assumed it was a response to the fact that he was among the more than 750 writers and artists who signed an open letter published in The London Review of Books on Wednesday that was highly critical of Israel.” (You’ll see that another of the features on your cultural map is implicated in all this.)
There’s a whole lot more. But Mr Schwartz’s question—“What’s changed between August and today at 2 p.m. that means that artists and thinkers and moral leaders like Viet and Min can’t come to the Y?” he asked. “I’m going to just let that question sit there.”—seems to connect with your cultural discombobulation?
Hmm, I’m afraid I’m with the 92nd St Y on this one. I may be dating myself here, but I can’t help but see all these English-Ethnic Studies types as a big part of the problem. They’re referred to as “the left” and they refer to themselves in that way, but I don’t see how the suite of concerns in which they operate are in any way “left”. Quite the opposite, their orientation is explicitly counter-solidaristic, and they are constantly bleating about identity in order to camouflage class distinctions. I’ve even wondered whether they are all the product of a secret underground laboratory in Brooklyn that’s funded by the Koch Brothers …
John Pillette
Viet Thanh Nguyen was (involuntarily) brought to this country after the fall of Saigon, as a very young child. My sense is that his parents arrived in the country with pretty much nothing -- they were not from the Vietnamese upper class and whatever wealth they had accumulated they apparently could not take w them. They worked hard (apparently classic immigrant story), and their sons (Nguyen and his elder brother) both became successful by (conventional) U.S. standards. Nguyen is a tenured professor at USC, and his debut novel The Sympathizer (which I've read) won the Pulitzer prize.
It's not unreasonable to think that Nguyen's very early life and subsequent experiences left him with some genuine issues of "identity" that he has had to work out -- that's certainly what The Sympathizer suggests.
I'm not going to express an opinion right now about the propriety of the 92Y's decision to postpone (or "cancel" depending on your p.o.v.) his talk, nor about the open letter he signed. However, it does seem to me that if anyone is entitled to write and talk about identity, he is.
I'm not particularly fond of the identity-politics "left," but I don't think that some literature professors perhaps working out, as apparently in Nguyen's case, their personal concerns by writing novels and memoirs and academic studies should nec. be labeled "part of the problem." I don't have to like all of his politics and maybe he shouldn't have signed that open letter, but he does seem to be a serious and talented writer. The Sympathizer is not the most subtle thing I've ever read, but it's a bitingly satirical, verbally exuberant, well-plotted novel, casting aspersions on what the U.S. did in Vietnam and its view of the Vietnamese but also not sparing either of the Vietnamese sides of the conflict. Having read it, I understand why it won the Pulitzer.
To JP, I am from New York and fit neither of your categories and in my three years in Israel and yearlong stint in Tsahal suffered quite a bit of culture shock- you seem genuinely curious- I figured they're Jewish I'm Jewish, they're a Western Culture- not quite- Israelis call it a difference in mentality- the irony is that the Arabs are very close to Jews in their psychology, at least to some extent- I'm not the first to observe this- their Jihadis can go to hell as far as I'm concerned, and I'm not crazy about the settlers, and Bibi- the collapse of the Peace Process twenty five years ago enabled both our extremists, and here we are- There is a category in Jewish thought, an informal category called the 'enemies of the Jews' going back to Biblical days and up to the Nazis and the Soviets and now the Palestinians- in the historical framework of many Israelis the Arabs and the Palestinians are merely the latest group to aim to eradicate us, and most of the time that genocide comes with a stern condemnation usually of a moral nature.
There is more to say, but for a different occasion- Israel is totally different than New York, just the latest major divide in the Jewish World
John Pillette: It reminds me of circa 2000, when most “everybody” had finally acknowledged that Guliani was a crypto-Fascist. Maybe not even so “crypto”. A few months later and everyone (I mean literally everyone) was praising him to the skies as “America’s Mayor” (gag, barf).
Most Black New Yorkers, myself included, still considered Giuliani to be fascist and virulently racist after 9/11. Only 8% of Black New Yorkers who spoke to exit pollsters following the November 2001 mayoral election* said that they would have supported another term for Giuliani if he had been able to run (yet 52% of whites said they would have).
*Giuliani had actually tried to cancel the election, overriding the state constitution, so that he could stay in office--insisting that due to the chaos wreaked by the 9/11 attacks, we couldn't function without him in charge)
W/r/t Nguyen, it’s funny that the Y would run into a problem with him in particular; the one and only thing of his I’ve ever read was a piece of journalism and I came away thinking that he was not only a phony but a complete prick into the bargain. That may make me (and probably does make me by his lights) an “Asian-o-phobe” but there it is.
More particularly, he’s a tenured professor at UCLA (or wherever) but he likes to “put on the poor mouth” (as the Irish expression has it) and I happen to find this kind of thing not just tone-deaf but in bad taste and (worst of all) done in bad faith. But that’s just me. AITA (Am I The Asshole)?
W/r/t Guliani, I put “everyone” in scare quotes as a shorthand way of saying “everyone in the world of the liberal intelligentsia” (who after all, hog all the microphones and column inches). I def did not mean to include Staten Island, either!
Well, maybe I should have said that Staten Island knew he was a fascist all along, but was perfectly OK with it ...
Prof Wolff, surely you can take heart in seeing Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, and Jenna Ellis all pleading guilty. (Or was Powell's sentence of just probation too lenient? Did you want to see blood?)
The central character (and first-person narrator) in Nguyen's The Sympathizer is a Vietnamese Communist double agent who is a mole on the staff of a South Vietnamese general. After the fall of Saigon, he accompanies the general in exile to the U.S., to southern California, where the general sets about plotting to put together an army (of sorts) to attempt to continue the war by invading Vietnam from Thailand.
At one point, the general, the double-agent/narrator, and some right-wing Americans from Orange County CA (including a Congressman) are having dinner in a restaurant. The center of attention at this dinner is a character named Richard Hedd, author of a book called Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction. At the dinner Hedd voices the racist view that Asians value life less than Westerners do. The narrator appears to challenge this, saying that Asians do view life as valuable -- however, he can't, in this setting, be seen to disagree with Hedd without risking displeasing the general and perhaps blowing his cover. So he wriggles out of the situation.
I just located the passage (p. 261):
"The General frowned and I paused.... So you're saying that Dr. Hedd is wrong, said the Congressman, as affable as Dr. Mengele must have been in the right company. Oh no, I hastened to say. I was sweating, my undershirt damp. But you see, gentlemen, while life is only valuable to us -- I paused again, and my audience inclined toward me by a millimeter or two -- life is invaluable to the Westerner."
As I said, subtlety is not the book's strong point, but it is clever and sometimes funny, as this scene suggests.
Eric, I am much cheered by these guilty pleas. In these terrible times, the legal troubles of Trump are one of my principal sources of pleasure.
If there's a hero or heroine in this whole mess, I'd say it's the 85 year old Israeli peace activist, Yocheved Lifschitz, who when released by Hamas, shook hands with one of her Hamas captors.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67204479
By the way, that's a little different than rejoicing when Trump supporters are found guilty.
It seems she was treated well so why not? Hamas capos really should have checked the pockets of the cadres before they deployed them:
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-769250#:~:text=Captagon%20belongs%20to%20the%20amphetamine,affordability%20and%20ease%20of%20manufacturing.
BTW, I still believe there's a non-trivial chance that Trump will, of necessity, skate on a capacity basis. His recent remarks seem to indicate marked deterioration.
aaall
Cd you summarize briefly what that J Post article says so we don't have to deal w their ads, popups, etc etc etc? Thx.
OK. (I don't get any ads, pop-ups, etc.)
"Hamas terrorists who carried out a surprise attack on October 7 were found to be under the influence of Captagon, a synthetic amphetamine-type stimulant that has been clandestinely produced in southern Europe and trafficked through Turkey to the consumer markets on the Arabian Peninsula, as reported by Nir Dvori of Channel 12.
The pills were recovered from the pockets of many terrorists who lost their lives on Israeli soil.
This stimulant drug, also known as the "cocaine for the poor," allowed the terrorists to commit heinous acts with a sense of calmness and indifference. Simultaneously, it kept them highly alert for extended periods and suppressed their appetite.
Captagon: Used by ISIS
Captagon gained notoriety in 2015 when it was discovered to be used by ISIS fighters to suppress fear prior to carrying out terrorist operations. As the influence of terrorist organizations like ISIS diminished, Lebanon and Syria took the reins and began producing and distributing the drug on a large scale.
Gaza, in particular, became a popular market for the drug, especially among addicted young individuals..."
And there's this:
https://www.livescience.com/65788-world-war-ii-nazis-methamphetamines.html
Makes sense.
During the Pinochet dictatorship it was said that the cops, fuerzas especiales (special forces), who broke up demonstrations with incredible ferocity and brutality, were given some form of speed.
s.w., the heroes are folks like the civilian who drove his pickup towards the fighting at huge risk and rescued a number of the people who fled into the desert from the rave, the retired general who managed with only a pistol, and the two young (M & F) IDF captains who fought off the terrorists in their pajamas.
aaall,
If you're talking about this minibus driver, who is Bedouin in fact, I certainly agree that he's a hero.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/bedouin-bus-driver-credited-with-saving-30-israelis-from-hamass-outdoor-party-massacre/
No, but him too certainly. Probably quite a few regular folks stepped up.
Absolutely great news! Congratulations. What a great honor as well as a delicious activity.
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