Scott Johnson at Powerline has a great post commemorating George Washington’s actual birthday—today, February 22nd. Johnson mentions especially the famous correspondence between Washington and Moses Seixas, then-president of America’s oldest Jewish congregation, Newport’s* Touro Synagogue, on the occasion of Washington’s visit there after Rhode Island’s ratification of the Constitution. Read the whole post here.
* The post originally mislabeled the location of the Touro synagogue as Providence.
Robert Knight of the Media Research Center, a conservative watch-dog group, is unhappy with me. In a piece I wrote for this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, I criticized Concerned Women for America (CWA), a group whose Culture & Family Institute Knight once directed, for the way it uses religion in the service of social conservatism. As I wrote:
For a taste of [intolerant fundamentalist] views, visit the Web site of Concerned Women for America, which bills itself as the “nation’s largest public-policy women’s organization.” Its mission is “to protect and promote biblical values among all citizens,” the Bible being “the inerrant Word of God and the final authority on faith and practice.” As for dissenters from CWA’s stand on issues like the “sanctity of human life,” a handy link to Bible passages explains “why you are a sinner and deserve punishment in hell.”
Knight calls this a “vicious mischaracterization,” so gross a distortion “as to constitute a lie.” My “out of context” quotes, he writes, have nothing to do with CWA’s position on “spiritual outreach.” Indeed, “nowhere does CWA state or imply that people will be sent to hell because of their views on public policy.”
It made big headlines in Israel on Wednesday, February 21, but I don’t imagine it got more than scant attention, if that much, anywhere else.
“Police thwart major suicide attack.” That’s not front-page news in America or England—unless, that is, it happened in New York or London. If it happened in Tel Aviv, you need at least a bomb going off, and preferably a death or two, for anyone elsewhere to sit up and take notice. And this explains a certain paradox: the more successful Israel’s army and security services are in preventing deadly acts of Palestinian terror against Israelis, the more the world looks upon the means of prevention as vindictive and unnecessary harassment of Palestinians on Israel’s part.
We’d like to welcome to contentions as a guest blogger David Pryce-Jones, senior editor at National Review. David has written about systems of belief from Nazism and Communism to Islam. Among his books are The Closed Circle and The Strange Death of the Soviety Empire. His latest book is Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews (Encounter Books). He is also the author of several novels. David brings his trademark erudition and assured voice to contentions, and we’re delighted to have him. Enjoy!
Maurice Papon has just died at the age of ninety-six, but his name will always stand for France’s moral collapse in 1940, and that country’s inability—or reluctance—to redress matters afterwards. In his capacity as a ranking Vichy official, the documentation proves, he signed the deportation orders to Auschwitz for 1,690 Jews, 223 of whom were children, organizing sixteen trains for them, the last in June 1944 when German defeat was certain. It was also his idea to send the bill for the expense of the requisite cattle-trucks to the Jewish representative council, thus obliging the victims to pay for their journey to be murdered. One of his German superiors described him as a sincere collaborator, “co-operating correctly with the Feldkommandatur.”
Almost a month after Lee Siegel’s expansive, unfocused paean to Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Ruth Franklin, a senior editor at the New Republic, has published her own astute (and devastating) review of the novel. (It’s worth noting that Siegel, in praising Mailer as a novelist, focused for the most part on Mailer’s works of “literary non-fiction.”) Franklin’s review skirts but does not point out explicitly the novel’s Manichean theology–a vision of the positive nature of evil that has consumed Mailer from the outset of his literary career. But both pieces are worth reading, especially for the sharp relief into which Franklin’s perspicacity casts Siegel’s confused tribute. And make sure to read John Gross’s review of The Castle in the Forest in the March issue of COMMENTARY.
Last week at the Cato Institute, I debated Michael Tanner and former Congressman Dick Armey, two stalwart libertarians. The occasion was the release of Tanner’s book Leviathan on the Right, one of the better distillations of the argument that George W. Bush has frittered away Reagan’s legacy, increased the size and scope of government, and betrayed conservative principles.
But Tanner’s argument is not persuasive. For one, the often-shrill complaints of a few years ago about runaway federal spending now seem overwrought. To everyone’s surprise, the size of the deficit has fallen dramatically over the past two years. This year the deficit will be 1.6 percent of the economy–a level lower than in 18 of the past 25 years. The federal budget is projected to be in surplus by 2012.
Dinesh D’Souza’s execrable new book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, has gotten the trashing it deserves in various articles and reviews—though perhaps not as many as the author would like, since controversy is essential to sell a book this meretricious.
Most of the reviews have focused, understandably, on D’Souza’s risible claim that Islamists attack us because of our popular culture, and that if only we would adopt the buttoned-down lifestyle of the “Greatest Generation,” the jihadists would leave us alone. As several reviewers have noted, Sayyid Qutb, the godfather of Islamist ideology, actually visited the U.S. in the late 1940′s and was thoroughly repulsed by our culture even in those “Ozzie and Harriet” days.
Stumping in South Carolina on Monday, John McCain unloaded on Donald Rumsfeld, calling him “one of the worst Secretaries of Defense in history.” Funny: I seem to remember that when Rumsfeld stepped down after the fall elections, McCain saluted his years of service.
Alas, this is a familiar pattern with McCain. In some ways he is one of the most admirable men in America. He seems consistent, fiercely independent, and principled. But at other times, he seems eerily reminiscent of Bill Clinton, constantly playing to reporters or to whatever audience he happens to be addressing.
Don’t fret too much if you missed Sunday night’s debut of The 1/2 Hour News Hour. The program—Fox News Channel’s answer to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart—was awful, not a real contender against its Comedy Central rival. It wasn’t just that the jokes on the Fox spoof often failed. That’s par for the course in satire, political or otherwise. It’s that the whole atmosphere of the show was grimly, thuddingly unfunny. The question is, why?
For Alessandra Stanley, the chief TV critic of the New York Times, the problem was the show’s conservative slant—that is, its single-minded focus on targets like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and global warming. The debut completely spares Dick Cheney and President Bush, the constant foils for Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart. As Stanley complained, “The Fox News comedy only leans on the Left.” For his part, the show’s creator, Joel Surnow, one of Hollywood’s few outspokenly right-wing big wigs, is happy to admit that The 1/2 Hour News Hour is “unabashedly coming from a certain point of view. . . . We’re not looking to be balanced.”
On January 11, China employed a medium-range ballistic missile to destroy a communications satellite 537 miles above the earth. Hans Kristensen, a specialist on space warfare at the Federation of American Scientists, called the Chinese action a “major foreign-policy blunder.” China, he wrote, “has severely weakened its own status in the push for international limitations on military space activities.”
What could the Chinese have been thinking? The New York Times editorial page had an answer (link requires subscription). Citing unnamed experts, it suggested “that China’s latest test is intended to prod the United States to join serious negotiations” to limit anti-satellite warfare.
The 21st century’s first blood libel, it appears, was only skin-deep. Ariel Toaff of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, an Italian-born medieval historian and the son of the chief rabbi of Rome, now claims that his new book Pasque di Sangre (“Passover of Blood”) has been misinterpreted. In any case, he says, he never really meant it when he wrote that in at least one case, that of the trial and execution of sixteen Jews in the Italian town of Trento in 1475, there may have been some truth in the medieval charge that Jews killed Christian children before Passover in order to use their blood to bake matzos.
To judge by his quoted remarks, Toaff seems—understandably, perhaps, given the fierce attacks on him in academic circles—a bit discombobulated these days. One minute he is ready to defend his book even “if the world crucifies me” (an interesting association in the context), while the next minute he has withdrawn it from circulation and barred his publisher from coming out with a second printing. And throughout it all he keeps insisting that he never had any inkling of the furor it would touch off. Although it’s hard to imagine a professor at a reputable Israeli university being so foolishly naïve, all the evidence seems to point to his being exactly that.
Eric Hobsbawm was given three pages to write a cover piece about the Spanish Civil War for the review section of Saturday’s Guardian. He produced a paean to the Communist and fellow-traveling intellectuals of the 30’s, who lost the war but won, he claims, a posthumous victory by “creating the world’s memory.”
The passage in which he deals with the handful of pro-Republican intellectuals who criticized Stalin exhibits Hobsbawm’s own relativistic attitude to the truth. George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, he says, was turned down by his fellow-traveling publisher Victor Gollancz and given a “critical” review in the New Statesman (i.e., a hatchet job) because, as Orwell himself wrote, Gollancz and his ideological allies believed that “one must not tell the truth about what is happening in Spain and the part played by the Communist party because to do so would prejudice public opinion against the Spanish government and so aid Franco.”
02.19.2007 - 12:01 PM
The new anti-Semitism described by Alvin H. Rosenfeld in a controversial essay published by the American Jewish Committee is not a myth, as his critics would have us believe. It is, sadly, all too real a phenomenon. If one criticism can be levelled at Rosenfeld’s essay on the succor that anti-Semitism receives from the anti-Israel rhetoric of liberal Jewish intellectuals, it is that his pool of examples, with the single exception of the British academic Jacqueline Rose, is drawn exclusively from the U.S. In fact, the emergence of Jewish voices demonizing Israel (and making condemnation of Israel, in some cases, their only expression of Jewish identity) is not unique to America.
This phenomenon is well known in Europe. If Rosenfeld ever publishes a second version of his essay, he will not have any difficulty bringing in literally dozens of additional examples. The continental landscape is littered with Jewish intellectuals engaged in exactly the kind of rhetoric he criticizes.
One of their newest outlets is Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), an organization now bidding to be the voice of Anglo-Jewry, as evidenced by its role in a debate hosted last week by the ultraliberal Guardian blog, Comment Is Free. Having taken part in this debate, I will not repeat what I said there. But a few more considerations are in order, as they apply to the debate triggered in America by Rosenfeld’s essay.
There is perhaps nothing more likely to give you a healthy skepticism about utopian politics than to know that your father was executed by the Soviet secret police. In the case of the abstract painter Jules Olitski, who died February 4, the result was a lifelong distaste for art that prostituted itself to a political agenda. Today such fastidiousness seems peculiar, the quaint relic of a vanished era, which might account for the note of polite ambivalence in his obituary notices.
Olitski was born in the Ukraine in 1922, a few months after his father’s death. His mother fled to New York, where Olitski grew up and studied painting. His father’s murder seems to have haunted him, and he perpetrated a hoax about a Soviet painter hiding from Stalin’s assassins in a Brooklyn basement, a strange alter ego whom he named Jevel Demekov—a variant of Jevel Demikovsky, his birth name.
Olitski came of age during the heyday of the New York School, but he had little use for the agitated canvases and violent gestures of Jackson Pollock and his ilk. Instead, Olitski looked to purge his canvases of all violence, or even the visible evidence of labor. He dyed his canvases with delicate stains, or sprayed them with fine mists of color; the shimmering pools of color that emerged looked as if they had formed spontaneously, the way that a veil of frost might appear on a window.
Olitski was not alone in his quest for diaphanous color. Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and others pursued similar artistic goals; collectively, they formed the movement known as color-field painting (or “post-painterly abstraction,” the rather ponderous term that Clement Greenberg assigned it). But Olitski’s star was short-lived. With the rise of Pop Art and the increasing politicization of art during the Vietnam war, his sensuous and apolitical art became deeply unfashionable. Nonetheless, he made ravishing chromatic essays to the end. At the same time, he remained a keen and outspoken critic of the art world. In a lecture a few years ago, he suggested that a kind of aesthetic Gresham’s Law was at work, in which low art drove high art out of circulation.
Reputations rise and fall, of course, and it may well be that Olitski will one day be rehabilitated. I rather doubt it. Such rehabilitations require publicity campaigns and the dissemination of images, and Olitski’s fragile essays are impossible to photograph with anything near the chromatic subtlety they require. One would as soon ask a short-order cook to make a copy of a gourmet dinner. This is to be regretted, for at a time when the entanglement of art with politics has been good for neither, Olitski’s principled stand has much to teach us.
Sabbatai Zevi, the 17th-century “false messiah,” remains one of the most enigmatic and seductive figures in the whole of Jewish tradition. He has had no better contemporary exegete than the great philologist and historian Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), a towering figure in in his own right. Scholem, who emigrated from Germany to pre-Israel Palestine in the early 1920′s and taught thereafter at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, more or less singlehandedly created the academic study of Jewish mysticism (kabbalah), an area of Jewish religious thought and experience long overlooked or repressed by Jewish historians.
“The Holiness of Sin,” Scholem’s landmark essay on the later followers of Sabbatai Zevi and the implications of their catastrophic turn toward antinomianism, appeared in English for the first time in COMMENTARY in 1971. To mark the 25th anniversary of Scholem’s death in February 1982, we offer this monumental work of modern intellectual history, along with Robert Alter’s sensitive and incisive introduction to Scholem’s life and works, “The Achievement of Gershom Scholem.” Enjoy.
I agree with Max Boot that the administration’s deal with North Korea sounds like a sell-out. The giveaway was Condi Rice’s pledge of “tough diplomacy.” What in the world is that? And what kind of diplomacy do we usually practice, soft diplomacy? How does that work? “Welcome to the store, Mr. Kim. Help yourself to whatever tickles your fancy. It’s on the house.” Well, if that’s soft diplomacy, how is our recent exercise in “tough diplomacy” any different?
To give the administration its due, the North Korean knot is plenty vexing. Since Pyongyang now has a nuclear bomb, military action becomes dicier than it already was with Seoul in range of thousands of North Korean artillery pieces. We have no economic leverage to speak of, and while no country on earth is a worthier candidate for regime change than North Korea, we have almost no ability to influence its internal politics.
This is one more reason why we must bomb Iran before it completes its nuclear weapon. An internal EU report, leaked to the Financial Times on Tuesday, acknowledges that “the problems with Iran will not be resolved through economic sanctions alone.” The “tough sanctions” that the administration talks about are just as spurious as “tough diplomacy.”
“The EU has agreed to pursue sanctions through the United Nations if the Iranians continues [sic] to reject the decisions of the IAEA Board and the UN Security Council,” says the report. The trick to this formulation is that it means the Europeans are prepared only for sanctions adopted by the Security Council, i.e., only sanctions that Russia and China will agree to. But as Russian President Vladimir Putin made clear last week, and Beijing has made clear often, they regard the U.S. as a bigger threat to their ambitions than Iran. They will not cooperate in tightening the vise on Tehran. And even if they did, it is extremely doubtful that Ahmadinejad, Khameini, et. al., will give up their birthright to dominate the Islamic world (or perhaps rule the whole world) for a mess of economic inducements.
I have explained elsewhere why the emptiness of other measures to stop Iran’s bomb and the terrible consequences that would ensue from a nuclear-armed Iran lead to only one conclusion: military action. But here is one more reason. Bombing Iran to destroy its nuclear weapons facilities is one way—perhaps the only way—to turn Pyongyang around. Kim Jong Il would no longer sleep easily worrying about whether his turn was next and might finally agree to trade in his nukes. Now that is what I call tough diplomacy.
Tadeusz Borowski, short-story writer, poet, and kapo in Auschwitz, took his own life at the age of 29. He left behind him one of the most important bodies of literary work about the Holocaust, a corpus doubly important for its proximity to the abyssal horrors of the camps and for its author’s tremendous literary talent—a confluence at times missing in the larger sphere of such literature. (One of Borowski’s most famous stories, “This Way for the Gas,” appeared in English for the first time in the pages of COMMENTARY.) Arno Lustiger, the German historian and author, yesterday reviewed Borowski’s new, posthumous collection Bei Uns in Auschwitz (“At Home in Auschwitz”), which has just been translated and published in Germany, for the indispensable Sign and Sight:
Borowski is among the important but little known writers to have bestowed an almost metaphysical dimension on Auschwitz. Although his oeuvre offers no contribution to the debate on “theology after Auschwitz”, it does help the reader to comprehend the unbelievable and the monstrous in the lives and deaths of Homo auschwitziensis, even if only to a limited extent. Borowski’s stories are characterized by great precision. He refrains entirely from moral value judgements, and there is not the slightest hint of empathy, making the book’s brutal, horrific passages a torture to read. Is this nihilistic indifference, this lack of empathy feigned? Was it the author’s provocative literary means of awakening empathy in the reader?
The whole piece (translated by Nicholas Grindell) deserves your attention.
Europe’s democracies have changed dramatically in recent years in response to Islamic population growth, growth fueled by immigration and birth rates substantially higher than local norms. Great Britain, France, Italy, and other nations have been forced to accommodate the needs and preferences of their Islamic citizens, often at the expense of the global conflict with radical Islam.
Can it happen here? Suppose that the writer Mark Steyn is right to argue that “demographics are destiny.” What number of Muslims, agitating for their self-defined interests and agendas, would constitute a critical mass in the U.S.? At what point would American politicians feel compelled to take up their cause?
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim American Society (MAS), and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) all worked overtime this past election cycle to create the impression that, in American politics, Muslims are now a force to be reckoned with. They were especially emphatic about the country’s growing Muslim population—some 8 million souls, in their oft-repeated estimates.
So it comes as a useful corrective to read Patrick Poole’s “Numbers Don’t Lie” in this week’s Front Page Magazine. Poole cites two recent pieces (in IBD and the New York Sun) criticizing the methodology of the survey that produced the 8 million figure and citing new estimates drawn from survey work done at CUNY and the University of Chicago—estimates suggesting that there are, in fact, not 8 million Muslims in the U.S. but well under 3 million. Moreover, of these, only a minuscule 4,761 are dues-paying members of CAIR, which presents itself as the community’s authoritative voice.
Whether CAIR or any of the others truly represents the sentiments of American Muslims is a question that political strategists might consider before pandering to their radical demands or overlooking their questionable (or worse) political associations, all amply documented over the years by observers like Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson. But why be fooled by numbers? The readiness to inflate the size of their alleged constituency is only another tactic in a campaign of intimidation to which too many have already succumbed.
Bookshelf
I’ve been catching up with the scholarly literature on Aaron Copland published since I last wrote about him for COMMENTARY. So far three full-length books have appeared, all of which are important—albeit in very different ways.
• In 1997, when I wrote “Fanfare for Aaron Copland,” discussing Copland’s hard-Left politics in public was widely regarded as a form of red-baiting. Even Howard Pollock, whose 1999 biography of Copland dealt more or less frankly with his close ties to the Communist party, was squirmily euphemistic when it came to such ultra-sensitive matters as his participation in the 1949 Waldorf Conference. Not so Elizabeth B. Crist, whose Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland During the Depression and War (Oxford, 253 pp., $35) is utterly forthright about Copland’s involvement in the Popular Front, an experience that she rightly sees as crucial to the making of such masterpieces as Appalachian Spring and the Third Symphony. The problem with Music for the Common Man is that like so many modern-day academics, Crist is starry-eyed to the point of idiocy about the Popular Front, and she’s also a bit of a jargonista to boot: “In Rodeo, the Cowgirl quite literally turns her back on typical displays of heterosexual romance and stereotypical, heteronormative feminine behavior.” Still, she’s done a first-rate job of relating Copland’s music to his politics, and her book is as illuminating as it is irritating.
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