In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.

For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com

 
I quote from Marilynne Robinson's novel, Gilead, which I just started on the train this morning (taking a break from Jewish fiction until I get some recommendations from readers):

[F]ifty sermons a year for forty-five years, not counting funerals and so on, of which there have been a great many. Two thousand two hundred and fifty. If they average thirty pages, that's sixty-seven thousand five hundred pages. Can that be right? I guess it is. I write in small hand, too, as you know by now. Say three hundred pages make a volume. Then I've written two hundred twenty-five books, which puts me up there with Augustine and Calvin for quantity. That's amazing. I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting through my thought and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. And I'll tell you frankly, that was wonderful.

This past weekend was this blog's 3rd anniversary. Since this blog was begun, a first child has entered our lives with his profound transforming effects, my work life has taken a quantum leap in scope and seriousness, and my own thinking has evolved in unexpected directions even as it has, essentially, remained the same, and recognizably my own. The blog can take no credit for the first two changes, but I think I can credit it to a considerable extent with the last.

And along the way I've written a whole lot of words. 700,000 of them, if I count correctly. At approximately 350 words per page, and about 300 pages per volume, that's about seven books. Not quite in Augustine and Calvin's league, but still kind of amazing.

Of course these comparisons are not fair; blogging is in no sense like the kind of deeply thoughtful work that makes a great book. It isn't even edited enough to be a minimally passable book. But even so, that's a lot of words.

But I pity the poor souls who had to sit through 30 page sermons. At least folks who read my blog can always click away.
posted by Noah at 3:01 PM

 
Steve Sailer is right that Morgan Freeman deserves some more interesting roles, but Freeman's dignity is his greatest asset. It would be kind of silly to cast him in a role that didn't let him use it. But there are lots more intereting things to do with dignity than just stand on it.

Why not make a decent movie of Othello for a change? There's a man who knew how to use his dignity . . . and who lost his marbles when he thought his dignity was lost. It would be a great role for him.

Or, here's a thought: cast him as King Lear. Do an all-black King Lear! Akira Kurosawa did it in Japanese, and it worked great! You could cast Freeman as Lear, Angela Bassett as Goneril, Jamie Foxx as Edgar. Ice Cube as the Fool! It would be awesome!

Actually, I think we should do lots more all-black Shakespeare. To heck with colorblind casting. Here's a project for Chris Rock to put his money behind: do the complete works of William Shakespeare with top-drawer all-black casts. Start with the greatest sequence of history plays, because they are the best vehicle for molding a cast into a real company: the great family saga and political epic that begins with Richard II, extends through Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and climaxes with Henry V.

Morgan Freeman would be perfect for John of Gaunt (unfortunately, it's the same dignified old guy he always plays, but heck, it's Shakespeare, so let's make an exception).

Denzel Washington would be able to stretch a little bit as Richard II, the self-absorbed lousy king who becomes a great poet even as he loses his crown. (Hint to Mr. Washington: play Richard II as if he were James Baldwin, and you're half way there.)

Lawrence Fishburne would be a great Henry IV, charisma wrapped around brute force. Watching his relationship with his son in Henry IV part 1 would be a reprise of Boyz 'n' the Hood, and watching him decline in Henry IV part 2 would give him a chance to stretch as an actor.

Will Smith would make a very interesting Prince Hal - he's maybe a little too likeable, but I'd rather err on that side, because the text gives us enough things to be ambivalent about Hal, so it's a good thing if the actor makes him likeable. And I'd like to see Smith play an aristocrat playing at being everyman instead of just playing an everyman.

I think there are lots of choices for Hotspur - it's a real scene-stealing role - but in my own mind I see Cuba Gooding Jr, who would certainly have great fun with the part.

And of course, for Falstaff, the only possible choice is Bill Cosby. Properly directed, this would be the triumph of his career.

The tough part would be the direction. Someone who is both very strong with Shakespeare (a decided rarity on stage, to say nothing of film) *and* who would make the best use of his black cast. Ideally you'd pick a black director, but I don't know if there is one with the Shakespeare chops and the cinematic chops. Anyone have a suggestion?

So: how do we get this ball rolling? Who knows a guy like Cosby or Freeman and can make the pitch? Once we get rolling, believe me, all of black Hollywood will be clamoring to get on board.
posted by Noah at 9:46 AM

 
So: make a smash hit film about a guy who allows himself to be killed to redeem the world, don't get nominated. Make a modestly successful film about a gal who asks to be killed because she can't bear to live as an invalid, win Best Picture.

You know, now that it was snubbed at the Oscars, I'm actually interested in seeing The Aviator. Had it won, I probably would have written it off.
posted by Noah at 9:33 AM

 
By the way, The New Republic continues to be really good on Israel, the War on Terror, Iraq and so forth. I think Peter Beinart is delusional in thinking that the road back to power for the Democrats is reviving the corpse of Scoop Jackson (and even more delusional in thinking that that's a realistic option for the Democrats), and I think this delusion colors the magazine's editorial stance. But between the covers there's a great deal of diversity and a lot of important imformation.

And they are still very good on the Court, on cultural matters (well, not their theater and movie critics, but books, the visual arts, and television are all covered very well) and on miscellaneous social and sociological stuff.

But the magazine is getting less and less serious on meat-and-potatoes domestic policy matters. And the latest cover story is a real beaut. An endless article on the evils of the market in health care that calls for a total government takeover of the healthcare system without a *single* reference to the problems that other countries have had with such systems, without a *single* mention of the role of innovation in the improvement of health outcomes - indeed, without a *single* acknowledgement that there are any critics of the author's positions or what their arguments might be. Astounding. And embarrassing.

Health care is a very tough area, and I think the standard GOP line is off-base in a number of ways. But this kind of piece is enough to make me want to flee back into the tent.
posted by Noah at 9:26 AM

 
Apropos of my comments yesterday on the IDF's concerns about Religious Zionist soldiers and whether they will obey orders to dismantle settlements: check out the following piece in The New Republic by the indispensible Yossi Klein Halevy. (BTW, I cannot recommend highly enough his first book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist. Fans of Slezkine's book - from both sides of the aisle - will love it.)
posted by Noah at 9:22 AM

 
Okay, enough pessimism for a spell. Lebanon looks like it finally may be coming out of the civil war that started when Arafat showed up, with the various ethnic groups united around the goal of kicking out the Syrians. (Of course, we still have to see what Hizballah does after that.) And Egypt is about to having something resembling multi-party elections. This matters, because Egypt - almost uniquely in the Arab world - is a real nation, and (as I have said) nationalism and popular democracy are deeply interconnected, and the latter doesn't work so well without the former. So there are positive developments out there, and they are not entirely unrelated to the Iraq war. Keep an eye on Egypt.

(Or, as someone once said: "Iraq is the tactical pivot/Saudi Arabia is the strategic pivot/Egypt is the prize.")
posted by Noah at 7:10 AM

 
Last post of the night: what oh what are we going to do with Natan Sharansky?

When I was in junior high school (I went to a small, mostly secular Jewish day school through eighth grade; remind me to tell you about it some time), our principal used to bus us over to the Soviet mission in Riverdale to chant slogans while we watched Rabbi Avi Weiss chain himself to the bars of the mission in protest against restrictions on Soviet Jewish emigration, and specifically in protest against the imprisonment of Natan (then Anatole) Sharansky. I remember the thrill when he was finally released and came to Israel, and how proud I was as he began to make his mark in Israeli politics.

I was particularly pleased with his positioning within the Israeli political spectrum. Sharansky headed a party, Yisrael B'Aliyah ("Israel in Immigration" or "Israel on the Ascent" - "aliyah" is the Hebrew term for moving to Israel to live, but it literally means "ascent" because you "go up" to Israel and "descend" whenever you leave the country) that was focused on Soviet immigrants (and, to some extent, other immigrants) but the agenda was always broader than that and got ever broader with time. And that agenda was both liberal in the European sense of advocating greater economic freedom and progressive in the early 20th century sense of seeking to make democracy work better and cleaner. He was a strong critic of the proportional representation system that has so crippled Israeli democracy. He had solid ideas about how to clean up Israel's very big problems with corruption and organized crime (Israel is known as one of the worst nexuses for money-laundering, and, not unrelatedly, as one of the key links in a global Russian mafia that extends from Moscow to Netanya to Brighton Beach and beyond; the problem has gotten bad enough that in the last election it appeared that mafia elements had gained a substantial foothold within the leadership of the Likud Party). And his positions on security, national and religious issues were all centrist: he favored a tough line on terrorism but flexibility on ultimate borders (the same line as the centrist Shinui party), and he favored retaining a religious establishment contoured broadly as it is now but with important adjustments to reflect the reality of Israeli society (such as Russian immigrants who are part Jewish but not Jews according to religious law, who cannot be buried anywhere in Israel because all cemetaries are under sectarian religious authority). I thought he had the makings of a future Prime Minister, possibly a great one.

And then, he did two things that struck me as very questionable.

The first was voting against Sharon's plan for a Gaza pullout. Sharansky cannot plausibly take the line that Israel intends to hold on to Gaza forever because it is part of the historic Land of Israel (forget whether that's true or not; whether it is or it isn't, that's not Sharansky's ideology). So the question I have to ask him is: what purpose do settlements serve? Can he really say, with a straight face, that they are an enhancement to Israel's security? Or does he favor staying in Gaza - not just continuing to fight terrorism there, which may or may not be necessary, but continuing an Israeli *civilian* presence there - because to withdraw under fire is anathema? I which case I would make three arguments: first, that it's not obvious the firing is ever going to stop (it has certainly gotten continually worse since the 1970s); second, that Israel's basic legitimacy is undermined by the blurring of the distinction between sovereign Israel and the territories, lending plausibility to the claim that a Jewish state is ipso facto a racist idea; and third, that Israel is losing this particular game precisely because, having no plausible alternative to a negotiated withdrawal, and no way to win the war (that is to say: no definition of victory that is not based on wishful thinking), Israel comes to "need" a negotiated settlement more than the Palestinians do, which results in political pressure for settlements that are deeply unwise (see, e.g., the Oslo Accords).

But it may be worse than that. Sharansky's position on Gaza may derive from a deeper stupid decision on his part: the decision to become an ideologue of what we're now calling the neoconservative persuasion, which is not what I considered him to be until his new book came out. Sharansky may believe that it is impossible for Israel to have peace with its neighbors until they are all liberal democracies, and this may really be his reason for opposing withdrawal from Gaza.

This is nuts on several levels.

First: Israel's peace with Egypt, cold as it is, has been a huge success for Israel and for Egypt. Israel rid itself of its most dangerous enemy and the threat of a two-front war. Egypt got back all its lost territory and cemented an alliance with the United States. Sharansky, presumably, would not have signed the Camp David Accords had he been in Begin's chair because Sadat - a true patriot who gave his life for his country - had not been democratically elected. That's crazy, no?

Second: how does he somehow go from believing that Israel will not have permanent peace until the region is liberal and democratic (which may be true for all I know) to concluding that therefore Israel should not withdraw from Gaza? When your tactical decisions can all be deduced from your ideological premises, your ideology has gotten way, way too rigid. Do the specifics of Israel's troop deployments also follow logically from first principles about peaceful democracies and warlike autocracies? Withdrawing from Gaza might be the right tactical move in a war that will still be going on, overtly or subtly, for many generations. Sharansky at least has to consider that perspective.

Third: doesn't Sharansky realize that his premise undermines the premise of Zionism itself? There are, admittedly, a number of varieties of Zionism running around. But none of them would coexist easily with the notion that Israel could never be secure until the region was transformed into a haven of liberal democracy. For many people, Zionism means the belief that Jews need somewhere where they will be secure, safe from pogroms and Nazis and so forth. But if Sharansky is right, it would have made more sense to emigrate to the Anglo-Saxon world than consider a national home in the heart of a region that because of its *nature* was going to remain hostile. Labor Zionism? Well, Sharansky's too much of a European liberal to want to support that anyhow; the old Labor Zionists thought Jews would, ultimately, be making common cause with the Arab masses against the forces of capitalism (to the extent that they thought about the Arabs at all). Revisionist Zionism? Jabotinsky thought the only way Jews would win a state was by force, but he did think they could win it. Sharansky would seem to be implying that Jabotinsky was wrong: it is, ultimately, up to the *Arabs* whether Israel gets a state, because Israel's war with them will continue not until they accept they are beating but *until they change fundamentally.* Religious Zionism? I hate to break it to Sharansky, but Rav Kook was not a liberal democrat.

Sharansky would respond to all of the above with optimism: people everywhere want freedom, so the Arabs want freedom, so a strategy of betting on freedom to solve Israel's problems with the Arabs is a better bet than anyone thinks.

That's a nice story, but it has some holes in it. Martin Kramer points them out better than I could; he knows the region better than most people, certainly including me, and he's generally considered "on board" in terms of Israel's tough approach to terrorism and Bush's approach to our own war on terrorism. I don't know if he's considered a neocon or not, but he's certainly been sympathetic. So check out what he has to say.

I would add only this to Kramer's analysis: tyranny is not in any way obsolete outside of the Arab and Muslim worlds. Without stretching the point at all, China has over a billion people and however that society is changing, it is not becoming a democracy. More to the point, Russia - the land of Sharansky's birth, so recently liberated by its own democratic heroes from the Soviet nightmare - is not so much slipping back into dictatorship as eagerly embracing a "strong hand" and a "Russian way" as the response to Russian's continuing and deepening problems. If Sharansky, a Russian, looking at recent events can talk about freedom's inevitable triumph, when freedom is to a meaningful extent being rejected in his own native country, how much credence can we give to his understanding of the trend lines in the Middle East, his adopted home?

Israel needs liberals, in the sense of people who understand and appreciate freedom and democracy deep down. Israel's founders did not hold those values in the innermost chambers of their hearts, and even the liberals among the Revisionists had a limited appreciation for the implications of their liberalism for the "Arab problem" or for how Israel's government should be structured. But Israel is a basically liberal and democratic society, which is precisely why she needs people who understand these things in their bones, and can push for reforms that will make their society work better and more justly. The way I put it sometimes is that Israel could really use someone who is a hybrid of Jabotinsky and Ahad Ha'am. I thought Sharansky might be such a person (and even if he isn't, he certainly is a liberal in his bones, which is plenty) and that's why I thought he would be so valuable to Israel. But if he spends his time talking about how *other* people need to become - and, inherently, will want to become - liberal and democratic, then he'll be wasting his formidable talents. There are plenty of Israelis to teach, Anatole; you don't need to go abroad in search of monsters to reform. About them, I wish you'd be a little more realistic.
posted by Noah at 10:11 PM

 
Returning for a moment to Israel: I'm afraid that here we go again. But with an important difference: by all reports, Abbas really does want to negotiate a peace agreement with Israel. He would have taken Barak's deal at Taba. He would love to get the same deal from Sharon. But he is treated with condescension by the youngsters in Fatah, and my suspicion is that Hamas' decision to play ball (until this weekend) was based largely on three factors: their decimation by the Israelis; their hopes to win political power through elections under Abbas' auspices (something Arafat would never have given them); and the fact that their main patrons and abettors have not decided whether it's in their best interests yet to urge them on (or, in the case of Egypt, a clear decision on the government's part to do what little they can to rein in Hamas before they (a) get too dangerous to Egypt through their connections with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and (b) become an official Egyptian problem if an Israeli withdrawal leaves chaos behind, in which case Egypt would perforce take on the Israeli role of crushing Hamas directly, something that would be very dangerous for them to do for reason (a)).

So what do I conclude? I'm not sure how anything changes, unfortunately. Abbas made it abundantly clear that he was in favor of peace with Israel on a genuine two-state basis. He also made it abundantly clear that he was not going to start a civil war in the Palestinian areas, and that he felt Hamas deserved a share in government. So: betting that Abbas was going to deliver on his hopes for peace cleanly and easily meant *from the beginning* a belief that Hamas, and, for that matter, Fatah actually wanted peace. Which they did and do not. Abbas did remarkably well at putting a truce together, much better than I expected. And, appropriately, he was rewarded by Sharon. Now he has to either take real action against the perpetrators of the bombing (which I doubt he can safely do) or . . . not.

If not, then it is worth reminding everyone that Sharon's withdrawal plans are *not predicated on a peace agreement.* Sharon has been talking for a long time now about a *unilateral withdrawal* as the solution to the problem of not having someone on the other side to talk to. I believe Sharon is utterly sincere in wanting out of the territories, by which I mean all of Gaza and that vast bulk of Judea and Samaria, and that he is prepared to bulldoze settlements even in the absence of any agreement in order to achieve his aims. So it would make no sense for Sharon to change his timetable for withdrawal at all because of terrorism. If he meant what he said before Arafat died - and I believe he did - then he favored unilateral withdrawal *even if terrorism continues* because keeping settlements in indefensible areas is, in his view, no longer in Israel's interest.

What I'm not sure Sharon himself knows is whether he *prefers* unilateral action to a peace agreement. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. A real peace settlement would bring greater international legitimacy to Israel's borders and end the whole question of the refugees that hangs like a sword over Israel's very existence. But it is very hard to imagine the Palestinians accepting anything that the Israelis could accept, something that became clear in the Barak years. The most accommodationist factions among the Palestinians expect the division of Jerusalem, Palestinian control of the Al Aqsa Mosque and the rest of the Temple Mount, compensation with territory for any territorial adjustment to the 1949 armistice lines, and the resettlement of some Palestinians in sovereign Israel. This is the most friendly position to Israelis taken by any Palestinian group - understandably, since even this would leave the Palestinian Arabs with a tiny, crowded, poor state, unable to defend itself or hold its head up among the Arab peoples.

But this is almost surely more than any Israeli government can give. The Temple Mount is the holiest place in Judaism. Jerusalem is the name that Jews have prayed with for thousands of years. The national anthem talks about the return to Jerusalem. The premise of Zionism is the return of Jews to their homeland, and if that does not include Jerusalem then it might just as well have been Uganda. And, finally, Israelis understandably feel that they have been making compromises and that the other side has not, even as they have been the victims of a brutal and utterly unethical war, a war in which not only civilians but women and children are deliberately targeted by the enemy, a tactic that can only serve to convince Jews that their enemies in this war, like many of their enemies in the past, did not consider them to have a right to live. Which is not a conclusion likely to encourage compromise.

Unilateralism, then, may have some appeal to Sharon. True, he would get no legitimacy from his actions. Israel would remain a pariah in much of the world, a state that decided its borders by force, and without the clout to force other countries diplomatically to accept its fait accompli (China, anyone?), nor sufficiently insignificant that the world happily looks the other way (Central Africa, anyone?). But Israel would have decided borders that she could live with - and, more to the point, she would not have ideologically compromised the premises of Zionism. Israel would have staged a fighting retreat. Nations can do that without undermining their essential reason for being. Even liberal, democratic states keep their options open: West Germany never formally renounced the notion of being the German state - i.e., it never said to East Germany: we do not and never will seek reunion with you.

Sharon must surely be cognizant of the crisis brewing in the Religious Zionist camp. It is sufficiently grave that the IDF is worried about how many soldiers will, implicitly by asking for reassignment or explicitly by actual insubordination, refuse to carry out orders to evacuate settlements. I strongly suspect that this crisis would actually be worse if Sharon carried out a withdrawal as part of a signed agreement recognizing non-Jewish sovereignty in the territories, particularly if the agreement included surrendering sovereignty over the Temple Mount. This may be one reason Sharon wants to withdraw before there is a final agreement even if he is negotiating towards a final agreement: that gives Israel's own romantic, integral nationalists the time to figure out how to live without this severed limb, how to ideologize the indefinite deferment of the dream.

So I don't know what Sharon prefers. But he certainly perfers having an Abbas to deal with than having an Arafat, or someone from Hamas, or utter chaos. So whether he prefers to get out unilaterally or via negotiation, he'll do whatever he can to bolster Abbas.

(Why, you ask, didn't he do so last time? Well, Abbas resigned his position, supposedly, because he understood Arafat had decided to have him killed. How much political capital would you invest in Abbas if you knew Arafat would have him bumped off before he ever had a chance to succeed? Now, at least, Sharon can say to himself that there is no Arafat around to make a deal impossible. That doesn't mean a deal is possible; it just means it isn't necessarily impossible.)
posted by Noah at 9:26 PM

 
Actually, now that I think about it, the problem I had with Humboldt's Gift was much the same as my problem with Ravelstein: a narrator I didn't care enough about who cared too much about himself. Roth, Ozick, Bellow, Singer: here's a bunch of writers with not too much in common. Three men and one woman; three natives and one immigrant (writing in an immigrant tongue); three Easterners and one Midwesterner; two conservatives, one liberal (Roth - I suppose that's what you'd have to call him 'cause he clearly wasn't on the right and clearly wasn't a committed Progressive) and one who-knows-what (Singer). What they have in common is that they're all American Jews of the latter half of the twentieth century. And they all (well, I haven't read enough Ozick to make the generalization, but on the basis of Puttermesser I bet I'm right) make frequent recourse to narrators who sound too much like themselves and are too solopsistic. What is up with that? And why do they bore me?

Not all solopsists bore me. Joyce and Kafka were great solopsists, and I adore them both. Kazuo Ishiguro is a contemporary novelist I like a lot, also a solopsist. Going back a bit further, so was Melville. For that matter, Dante and Milton were pretty deep into themselves, and if they bore you something's gone seriously wrong. That's not to say I'm especially partial to solopsists. Shakespeare absolutely wasn't. Cervantes absolutely wasn't (the Don is, but the Don is *not* Cervantes, that dreadful musical's assertion to the contrary). Twain most assuredly wasn't. And I don't think you could fairly accuse Tolstoy either, who was indeed a titanic egotist, of making his own little world in which he could be God (it would be fairer to say that he had the audacity to pose as akin to God in *this* world, in *our* world).

But somehow this batch is really annoying me all of a sudden.

Maybe I'm being too tough. I liked Goodbye, Columbus, and I thought I might like (but haven't yet read) American Pastoral. I liked Henderson the Rain King. I like many of Singer's short stories (and Satan in Goray, which is an overgrown short story; and The Slave, just because it's so romantic - in the Harlequin sense). But I'm not sure. Maybe it's a generational thing?

So here's a request for recommendations: American Jewish novelists (or short story writers) who are not going to annoy me, particularly if they have that rare knack for creating convincing characters not themselves. As I run through a mental list, I'm coming up alarmingly short. (Grace Paley? guilty as charged. E. L. Doctorow? Massively overrated and deeply mendacious. Allegra Goodman? Very sweet, but not top drawer. Mark Helprin? The first 200 pages of Winter's Tale are wonderful. I think it would have made a great 300 page book. Unfortunately, it's 800 pages long. Stanley Elkin? Haven't tried since just after college, when I was more receptive to his kind of weirdness, and somehow it didn't take. But perhaps I should try again. Jonathan Safran Foer? Oh, I've been dreading reading him. And I'm sure you can guess why.)

How about it? Anyone have any helpful suggestions?
posted by Noah at 2:31 PM

 
Finished Ravelstein on Friday. I think this may be the stinkiest of the books I've read yet on my continuing Jewish kick. I was warned that the book didn't reveal much about Bloom's thinking; I suppose that's true, though it confirmed what a left-wing literature professor friend of mine once said about the distinction between right-wing Nietzscheans (exemplified by Bloom) and left-wing Nietzscheans:

Right-wing Nietzscheans: loved the elitism, hated the transvaluation of all values
Left-wing Nietzscheans: loved the transvaluation of all values, hated the elitism

Ravelstein is billed as a portrait of Bloom, "warts and all" but pretty much all you get are the warts. Bloom, as depicted, was a particular species of queen. All his eccentricities - his love of beautiful things and the good life; his obsessive consumption and dissemination of gossip, particularly of a sexual nature; his bouts of brutal honesty about his interlocutors' faults and subconscious motivations - these are just the standard behaviors of his species, one with which I am adequately familiar and for which I have plenty of affection in individual instances, but these do not add up to a life, or anything close to it. Bloom's thought, inasmuch as Bellow touches on it - Eros as the noblest but hopeless quest for your lost other half; the need to reject family and tradition and achieve your own, individual apotheosis - also comes off as typical or even symptomatic. Was Bloom really so uninteresting? Or did Bellow really not know any other gay men like this, to provide a frame of reference?

The real crime of the book is that it leaves you with no notion of what made Bloom so magnetic to his disciples, nor even what the basis was for his friendship with Bellow. A certain degree of affection does register, but barely; for so much of the book, the author-surrogate, Chick ruminates pointlessly on his own marriages, his health, his art, that we frequently lose sight of the book's purported subject altogether. Ravelstein, in his last days, begins, uncharacteristically, to ruminate on Jewish tradition and religious themes. But it all takes place behind a kind of screen; Chick doesn't get close enough, emotionally, nor is he serious enough intellectually to engage with this rumination, to see whether it means anything or whether it's just a late recognition of the ethical implications of universal mortality.

Anyhow: a big disappointment. Comparisons to Boswell - which are raised, outrageously, in the book itself - could not be less apposite.
posted by Noah at 2:14 PM

 
Forgot 2 other Jewish books as part of the kick:

Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel by Daniel Elazar, and The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick. Both were disappointments.

I had really high hopes for Elazar's book because I happen to agree with the general idea that connects popular sovereignty (the core idea that undergirds political democracy) with ideological nationalism (which may be but certainly does not have to be coextensive with ethnic nationalism), and that connects nationalism with the biblical conception of Israel as a distinct people. Hence empires and other transnational constructs (like Austria-Hungary or the contemporary European Union) can be liberal but they can't be truly democratic because they have no sovereign people. Anyhow, I buy this idea, so I was interested in reading a book that delved more deeply into the biblical roots of modern liberal democracy. Elazar's book was a disappointment because its argument could have been pithily expressed in a short article; because it doesn't adequately distinguish the "covenantal" tradition that he identifies from the other streams that water our democracy (the Greco-Roman and the Germanic streams, which are rather as important if you asked me); and because of a generally boosterish tone that I don't approve of in a work of scholarship. I got the feeling, reading the book, that Elazar was in the process of building an ideology rather than making a disinterested argument, and that made the book less appealing. If I can make an analogy, I found it unconvincing in much the same way that I find arguments about the Roman Catholic origins of moden democracy unconvincing. In both cases, there is some truth to the argument, but there is a lot of truth left out of the argument, and that missing truth is left out because the writer is *committed* in the old leftist sense, which I don't, ultimately, approve of.

Ozick was disappointing for simpler reasons: I thought the book was boring. The most celebrated episode in Puttermesser's life is when she creates a golem (an early-modern Jewish version of Frankenstein's monster) to help her out with her personal and professional life. For no reason I can ascertain, the golem is created without her (it's a girl golem) creator's conscious awareness of what she is doing, and once created she fulfills a not-very-surprising-or-interesting fantasy (she cleans up New York by making everyone civilized) and then destroys everything she created by becoming sexually voracious. Whatever this whole sequence meant to Ozick, it didn't mean much to me. Finally, the worst sin of the book: an utter and total lack of a sense of humor. That's a failing in any writer; it's a mortal sin in a Jewish one.
posted by Noah at 2:40 PM

 
Been on something of a Jewish kick lately, reading-wise. I re-read Portnoy's Complaint after John Derbyshire declared it the funniest novel he'd ever read. (My recollection was that it was pretty side-splitting as well; re-reading, it was, frankly, just OK. I mean, you get the idea after a few pages, and Roth never tops the early line about his mother standing over him with a knife to get him to eat. And the ending - not the punchline coda but the actual ending, the business with the Israeli girl - is both really obvious and really false. And really dumb.)

Then I read The Family Moskat, Isaac Bashevis Singer's purported masterpiece, a multi-generational Jewish family saga set in Poland from the beginning of the 20th century to the start of World War II. I felt like I was still hanging out with Portnoy! Roth thinks that his sex-obsessed narrator is the product of the collision of Old World neurotics with New World pneumatics, but here are Singer's recent migrants from the shtetl to Warsaw behaving in just the same way - running around, having serial affairs. Practically everyone in the novel gets a divorce or abandons their wife or husband by the end of the book. The whole society as depicted is both utterly unbelievable and, frankly, very unattractive. I've read a bunch of Singer and the more I do the more convinced I am that what's really worth reading are the short stories, much more than the novels.

Then I read the fascinating but maddening new book by Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century. I'll have to spend a bit more time on this one. The book has achieved what one would think is impossible: positive reviews in the Jewish press and the paleocon press, basically because Slezkine has written the kind of book that Kevin MacDonald would write if he were a philosemite rather than (as he appears to be based on descriptions of his work, which I haven't read) an anti-Semite. He has written a book about the Jewish people as *actors* in history, rather than merely *victims* of history. He hasn't fallen into the trap of having to either say "the Jews" did this or did that, or, on the other hand "anyone who talks about 'the Jews' as such is 'objectively anti-Semitic.'" Rather, he talks about the Jews as we talk about other people: not as sinister conspirators or utter innocents, but people, a group of people, with a certain degree of family-feeling as well as a certain degree of *commonality* which, even in the absence of any family feeling, predetermines a certain degree of common behavior.

The "big-picture" argument of the book is that the 20th century was the Jewish century because it was the century when everyone (in the West, at least) became Jewish: when we all abandoned our roots and became protean (his term is Mercurian) moderns. Anti-Semitism is just a particuarly spectacular species of anti-Mercurianism: the suspicion that peasant/warrior cultures have for the tinkers/traders who live among them but are not of them, and with whom they have an uncomfortable interdependence. And the 20th century saw such a murderous outbreak of anti-Semitism because the rise of liberalism empowered Jews by vastly increasing the rewards to Mercurian behavior even as the rise of nationalism made traditional Mercurian "difference" very politically problematic.

This argument is, frankly, not very new and only somewhat interesting. At one level it is obviously true - there is a reason that the Indians and Arabs are known as the Jews of Africa, the Chinese known as the Jews of Southeast Asia, and so forth: because this whole business of Mercurian minority trading cultures living in wary tension among Apollonian peasant/warrior majorities describes a reality. But this isn't really news, is it? And Slezkine doesn't do much to advance the argument other than invent a new terminology. And the thesis lacks explanatory power in that it lays off on someone else the problem of explaining why, for example, America, Britain and France handled the growth of their Jewish populations, and their unexpectedly spectacular success, rather differently than Germany did - or, for that matter, Russia did. And that strikes me as a much more interesting quesiton.

The other problem with the book is that Slezkine has such a way with the pregnant anecdote and the persuasive generalization that you sometimes fail to notice that the actual *evidence* of the book is relatively thin. That's not especially a problem in a work of cultural criticism, which this is in part. It's a bigger problem in something that purports to be a work of history. There's ample precedent for this kind of writing; Hannah Arendt and Camille Paglia come immediately to mind. But these writers have also been justly criticized, and I think Slezkine deserves the same criticism.

But what *is* interesting about the book is the later chapters, the material about the trajectory of the Jewish people in the Soviet Union. Again, the material Slezkine covers isn't really new: if you've read Isaac Babel - and if you haven't, you should; he was a marvelous, luminous writer - you've got the necessary literary background (Slezkine moves probably too smoothly between fact, fiction and his own reading of fiction in telling his story; that makes for very good reading, but you have to keep watching him to make sure whether he's talking about real people or characters in a novel) for the Jewish "romance" with Russian culture and the "rebellion against Jewishness" that fuelled enthusiasm for Communism at least as much as hatred of Tsarist-era discrimination; and if you've read good histories of the early Soviet Union, you're aware of the heavy over-representation of Jews in the Communist elite, and particularly in the Cheka and its successor, the NKVD. But while the information isn't new, it isn't so well known, especially in the United States, and Slezkine ties it all up in a neat and very poetic package. And, again, he does something rare in discussions of the Jewish people: he describes them as *actors* rather than *victims* or, at best, *reactors* to others. About the only Jewish enterprise that gets that kind of treatment generally is Zionism, but as Slezkine points out, Zionism was much less popular than Communism among pre-WWII Jews.

(And Slezkine is correct to call this involvement with Communism as an enthusiasm. There's a conversation in Moskat between a Polish police interrogator and a Jew arrested - mistakenly - for Communist activity. They get into a conversation about why so many Jews are Communists, and the Jew basically blames it on anti-Semitism. To which the Polish interrogator intelligently replies that this response is not very smart on the part of the Jews, since nothing inflames anti-Semitic feelings more than Jewish involvement with Communist movements. But the true answer, which Slezkine correctly makes much of, is that Communism was appealing at least as much because it was a revolt against *Judaism* as because it was a revolt against the Tsar.)

Slezkine is careful to say that Communism was not a Jewish enterprise and that most Jews were not Communists, both true statements. He nonetheless winds up suggesting that, at least in its early phase, Communism was to a considerable extent *about* a Jewish revolt against Jewishness, if only because there were so many Jews among the top Communist leadership, and this revolt was what motivated *them* to be Communists. But I wonder to what extent this is true. Jews were, after all, also over-represented in the top ranks of Italian Fascism. But it's a considerable stretch to see Fascism as in any way *about* a Jewish revolt against Jewishness, or even a manifestation of a modernity that is essentially Jewish. Don't mistake me: Italian Fascism was *profoundly* modern - certainly as modern as Leninism if not more so. But if you want to make an argument that the Modern Age was quintessentially *Jewish*, Italian Fascism is a strange place to start. So if Italian Fascism attracted Jews, but was in no meaningful way a Jewish "project" then what does that say about Soviet Communism (which, admittedly, attracted many more Jews than Italian Fascism did, but still the point remains).

Slezkine is writing important history about Jewish participation in the Soviet experiment. But while I think this history is very important, his emphasis may nonetheless distort his perception of the rest of Jewish history in the 20th century. For example: Slezkine makes much of Jewish American warmth toward the Soviet Union, in marked contrast to mainstream American perceptions of the Communist state. But is Slezkine right? Anecdotes about the New York Jewish Intellectuals aside, how did the typical Jew in Cleveland view the Soviet Union? How did Harry Truman's Jewish haberdasher partner feel about the Soviet Union? (And remember: Harry Truman - *the* indispensable man at the genesis of the West's response to the Soviet challenge - as late as 1950 was heard to say that he liked "Uncle Joe.") Who's ultimately more representative of American Jewry in the 20th century - Irving Kristol or Irving Berlin?

What I'm saying, I guess, is that the history Slezkine presents doesn't say what some people may read into it. Jews have been very successful in the modern world, and that may indeed have to do with the way the requirements of modernity dovetail with the cultural strengths of the Jewish people. They've been successful in America, and over-represented in the American elite, and they were successful in the early Soviet Union, and over-represented in their elite. Both successes involved something of a revolt against traditional Judaism and an eager embrace of modernity. But the involvement with Communism was an involvement with evil, while the involvement with America was an involvement with, I would certainly argue, something basically good. So it's not that the Jews made modernity but that modernity empowered the Jews, individually and collectively. And *what they did with that power varied a lot* depending on where and when and by whom that power was wielded.

I thought a lot about another book about the Jews, an utterly different sort of book, when I was reading Slezkine. Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin wrote a book some years ago called, ambitiously, Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism. Their argument, ultimately, is a religious one. The Jews were chosen by God, and what we were chosen for was to be His witness. Generally, this means to reject idolatry; specifically, it means to be an inevitable thorn in the side of idolators throughout the ages. This enables Prager and Telushkin to draw a straight line from Nazi-era racial anti-Semitism back to Imperial Rome's campaign against the rebel Jewish kingdom. (The Greco-Roman world was actually quite ambivalent about the Jews, viewing them sometimes as a nation of philosophers, other times as people whose beliefs were monstrous, and other times quite simply as dangerous rebels with possible connections to the enemy Parthians. It's notable, though, that prior to contemporary America and with quixotic exceptions like the Khazar kingdom, the only society that featured any significant number of conversions *to* Judaism was Imperial Rome.) It also enables them to indict Soviet Communism as another idolatry that inevitably turned on the Jews. But of course, this skips over the rather prominent role that Jews had in building that particular idol.

Nonetheless, as a believing Jew I think Prager and Telushkin are expressing something important, even if mixed up with some unpersuasive apologetics. *Judaism*, even in its quietistic variants, expresses a witness, a critical witness with respect to the world as it exists. And this has both necessary consequences for actual Jews as well as additional inevitable consequences inasmuch as this critical attitude, as part of the Jewish cultural baggage, can remain even as the rest of the baggage is discarded.

The question I think that should be asked, apropos of the Jewish involvement in the Soviet enterprise, is not *why* did so many Jews become Communists (there are many reasons, one of which is that Jews the world over were trying to succeed and the Communism was one of the few routes in Russia but one of many routes outside of Russia to that success), nor *whether* "the Jews" have something to apologize for, collectively, with respect to the Communist experiment (as the Jews have, for example, demanded collective responsibility of the Germans or of the Catholic Church), but *how* did Judaism fail. *Judaism* after all is the moral framework within which the Jewish critical atttitude, so useful in modernity, is embedded. And Judaism failed, spectacularly, for a whole generation of Jews - if not many generations. How did it fail? How were so many Jews left spiritually defenseless against the Communist temptation? (For that matter, this is equally a legitimate question for European and Russian Christians to ask with respect to both Nazism and Communism: how did *Christianity* fail in the face of radical modern evil?)

Anyhow, I'm continuing the Jewish kick. The next book I'm reading is Saul Bellow's combination love-letter, obituary and fictionalized kiss-and-tell story of Allan Bloom, Ravelstein. I could not finish Humboldt's Gift, but maybe that's because I have no interest in Delmore Schwartz. Allan Bloom seems like a more important figure to me. So I'm interested to see what I make of this particular Jew who tried to shore up the (in his view pagan) foundations of moral sense in the United States. I'll let you know what I think.
posted by Noah at 12:38 PM

 
An Armenian defends Turkey. Signs of the End Times . . .
posted by Noah at 12:27 PM

 
Saw "The Gates" this past weekend in Central Park. I have to admit, I wasn't especially moved, either in a good or a bad direction. I think the idea is supposed to be whimsical, but it's such a hypertrophied whimsy that it somehow doesn't play. I didn't feel like the gates "revealed" the park; if anything, they run contrary to Olmstead's spirit in that he tried to build a park where you'd get lost among the various forking paths, and the gates, by highlighting those paths in orange, make it much harder to get lost. And the appeal of the gates as a "happening" - lots of people in one place largely for the purpose of having lots of people in one place - is limited to me. I'm all in favor of communal civic events, even quirky/bizarre modernist ones; I am, for example, a big fan of Bloomsday, and try to celebrate it in some fashion annually, even if only by doing a bit of reading to the wife and drinking a nice glass of burgundy. But there should be *some* content to event in question, and I don't see that there is any to the gates.

And then there's the fact that, as a physical therapist my wife works with said, "they say it's supposed to be saffron, but that's not saffron: it's traffic cone orange!"

But, on the other hand, the whole business didn't strike me as in any way sinister, as it appears to have struck Myron Magnet. And the thing was paid for privately, and appears to have been executed with negligible environmental impact. And they didn't do anything to the gorgeous Olmstead-designed park in *my* neighborhood (Prospect Park). So while I'm not enthused, I'm also entirely unoffended. So if you enjoy walking around with a gazillion other people under blocky orange gates (they are supposed to look like overgrown slalom gates, though, aren't they? which means we should be going *around* them, right? whatever . . .) don't let me spoil your fun.
posted by Noah at 12:00 PM

 
Well, this certainly isn't an encouraging report. And here I was only a few days ago repeating my mantra that the emergence of the AKP is a "long-term positive." What do I know.

Ankara, of course, is in the center of Turkey, in the countryside, far from the Westernized and modernized economic elite of Istanbul. But this is, nonetheless, pretty bad.

The interesting question is: to what extent is this all about Iraq? The Islamists have been gaining strength in Turkey for many years now, and moderating their message as they gain strength. Erdogan's party doesn't just favor making the Turkish state more friendly to Islam; it has also been a leader in curbing human rights abuses by the military, in strengthening the democratic system, and a forceful advocate for joining the European Union. None of that means that he's friendly to the U.S. or U.S. interests in the region. But they hardly sound like the platform of a party bent on turning Turkey into Iran.

So what happened? Turkey's secular left has always leaned towards Europe and away from America, for the same reasons that the European left is anti-American. The backbone of Turkish support for America came from the conservative, religious middle class, which was patriotic and anti-Communist if also unhappy with the official secularist ideology of Attaturk. This is the same class that Gilles Kepel identifies as crucial to the success of the Islamist revolution in Iran and to the electoral success (vetoed by the military) of the Islamists in Algeria. This class used to vote for Turgut Ozal's Motherland Party, which was conservative and relatively congenial to the "pious bourgeoisie" while still supporting secularism within the state, and very pro-American.

So the question of who "lost" Turkey is the question of who "lost" this class of voters. To a considerable extent, the answer is the corruption of the major Turkish parties; the AKP rose to power because it promised clean governance more than anything. Once in power, the AKP was necessarily going to pull away from America if only because their agenda in foreign affairs was to integrate Turkey with its neighbors - which meant on the one hand membership in the EU and on the other hand better relations with Iran and Syria.

But pulling away from America is one thing; the kind of rabid anti-Americanism described in the article above is another. So I would be very interested to know whether that anti-Americanism substantially predates the Iraq war, or whether it overwhlemingly postdates it. If the latter, the answer to "who lost Turkey" (to the extent that Turkey is "lost" as opposed to having a bad episode that will pass) is the architects of that war - and that's a very big black mark. If (as is the case with Europe, Russia and China) the answer is the former (that anti-Americanism was rising sharply well before the Iraq war) that's a bigger worry, because it suggests it will be very hard to "win" Turkey back.

Of course, I shouldn't panic about one article. But it's not encouraging.
posted by Noah at 8:37 AM

 
I'm inclined to agree with Steve Sailer's utterly unsubstantiated hypothesis that the reason it took so long to count the votes in Iraq was that this gave time for Sistani to generously deal other parties into the governing process. If Sailer is right (and again, he has no evidence at all, just an intelligent hunch) then the final results speak well of Sistani and his intention to govern a unified Iraq rather than tip the country into civil war.

It took us a long time post-invasion to figure Sistani out, and we've probably still got a lot to figure out. I don't have any special knowledge here. But I did want to weigh in on a couple of things. There seems to be a division of opinion among the blogosphere as to whether Sistani is resolutely opposed to an Iranian-style theocracy or whether he, in fact, promises to usher in exactly that. From what little I know about him, I don't think either answer gives quite the right picture.

The great political heresy of the Iranian regime is *rule* by clerics. Nominally, Iran has an elected parliament, a president and all that, but the real power rests with the Supreme Leader and the Guardian Council. Traditionally, the Shia held that clerics should abjure political power and serve as a kind of conscience of the country able to criticize the ruler when he deviates from the Islamic path. It's not that the state should be neutral in matters or religion, much less secular, but rather than institutionally clerics should not take political power lest they be corrupted by it. Sistani appears to strongly support this traditional perspective; he has refused to run for political office and has proclaimed clearly that clerics should not have positions of power.

But this does not mean that he favors an American-style neutralism in matters of religion, or a French-style official secularism, or a limp British-style religious establishment, or a Canadian-style multi-cultural "establishment". He does, after all, favor a government whose fundamental basis is Islamic law, and I would expect him to tell people to vote against a party that took "un-Islamic" positions. Is such a stance compatible with democracy? Once again: it depends. The Christian Coalition tells people how to vote, and it's entirely compatible with democracy (whatever its opponents say). But the Saudi state - which is not a democracy at all - is also an example of a system where clerics do not rule but do determine substantially the content of the political system.

Let me digress to make an Israeli analogy to the difference between how Iran's system works and what Sistani may favor. Within the Likud there is a faction - not especially strong but rather alarming nonetheless - called Jewish Leadership. This faction formally supports an Iranian-style system for Israel, complete with a rabbinical council that would wield the real power by overruling any act of the Knesset that conflicted with Jewish law. They are not shy about admitting that they favor the elimination of the democratic system and its replacement by something that (in their view) is more authentically "Jewish." The largest religious party in Israel, the Shas party, favors making halachah (Jewish law) the law of the land, but this means something different from what Jewish Leadership means. Shas has not called for a council of rabbis to wield formal power, and Shas's "spiritual leaders" do not run for office. But they *do* tell their voters (and their MKs) how to vote. Shas intends to pass laws to conform Israeli laws in various ways to religious law, but they do not propose eliminating the democratic system. "Jewish Leadership" is explicitly and forthrightly opposed to democracy. Shas is much more complicated. It may well *not* be compatible with democracy as we understand it in the West, but it's far from easy to articulate *why* it is incompatible with democracy without suggesting that *any* party with a religious-based agenda is similarly incompatible.

In any event: I suspect what Sistani favors is something like what Shas favors in Israel. That is to say: you would have a democratic political system, but his party (by virtue of a Shia majority in the country) would be the dominant party. Clerics would not exercise a veto over legislation, but they would instruct voters and legislators how to vote. And the law would be based on, and designed to implement, Islamic law.

Do we care if this is his agenda? Do we care whether this is "true" democracy? Yes and no. I don't think Iraq is an especially good laboratory for the question of democracy in an Islamic context, precisely because it is so fractured and has such a weak political tradition. Turkey, Egypt and Iran are each much more important in this context. I've said before that I view the emergence of the AKP in Turkey as long-term positive even though it is short-term negative for America, because the AKP seems to be groping towards a way for Islam to find political expression without being politically oppressive. The important challenge for Iraq is not "can we leave behind a model democracy" but "can we leave behind a reasonably stable political structure that isn't brutal or anti-American." In that regard, it matters a lot more how the dominant Shia treat the Sunni Arabs and Kurds and whether the government aligns itself with Iran than whether the government regulates female dress codes. On the former, we've seen a number of promising signs from Sistani. On the latter, the signs are fewer and conflicting. I will note, though, that Sistani seems smart enough to know that America and Iran are alike dangerous to his health. He's likely to try to keep us each close enough to protect him from the other, and each far enough to avoid being swallowed up.
posted by Noah at 10:08 AM

 
Good speech. Very good speech. Clearly, there is still reason for me to put out my brilliant all-explaining piece on Social Security reform - the President put it at the heart of the speech, so he means it.

And the foreign policy parts of the speech were good, too - much more balanced than some of the President's recent utterances.

Apropos of which, a thought. The President talked, at one point, how the recent election proves that Iraqis are ready to fight for their freedom, and that we are fighting alongside them. I think that logic may be faulty. We've indeed just witnessed the quite edifying spectacle of millions of Iraqis risking life and limb to turn out to vote, including in the Sunni Arab areas that stand to lose the most from Iraq's transformation (whatever it's transforming into, it's not going to be a dictatorship run by the a Tikriti clan anymore). We've also witnessed, for about a year now, the pretty decisive failure of the Iraqi forces we're training to turn into a real fighting force. The only Iraqi soldiers showing discipline and mettle are the Kurdish militias; apart from them, the Iraqi forces have been thoroughly penetrated by insurgents and have a pronounced tendency to desert at the first sign of trouble.

What do those two facts - that Iraqis, in large numbers, have been willing to risk death to vote in their first real election, and that Iraqis have not, in large numbers, been willing to risk death to kill those who have declared "democracy" an enemy - add up to?

They add up to a complicated picture, a picture of Arab and Iraqi culture, with strengths and weaknesses that are likely to be enduring. The Arab peoples have been getting other people to fight for them (and, in many cases, they wound up ruling them) for centuries - the Berbers (who accomplished most of the conquest of North Africa and Iberia), the Kurds (Salladin, liberator of Jerusalem and founder of the Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt, was a Kurd, leading Kurdish troops) and the Turks (who, of course, wound up controlling virtually the entire Islamic world), and so forth. It may be equally wrong to deduce from the election turnout that the Iraqis will fight to defend their nascent democracy as to deduce from the wide-scale failure of the Iraqi security forces that the Iraqis do not want to or cannot live under a more civilized and democratic government than has usually characterized the region.

posted by Noah at 4:48 AM