Oppenheim Arts & Letters

Melanie Phillips Speaks to the Middle East Forum

Ms. Phillips began her talk by emphasising the threat of Islamism, which inverts all logic by, for instance, portraying Israel's attempts to defend itself as unprovoked acts of aggression. Yet Western intelligentsia has adopted the Islamist narrative on the Middle East. Ms. Phillips attributes this to the current tendency among the intelligentsia to be swayed by ideology, rather than rationality and empiricism, on issues such as global warming, the Iraq war, Israel, and scientism. Although these ideological stances are secular in nature, they resemble religious beliefs in many ways, for instance, their intolerance to dissent which is viewed as an obstacle to the "path to perfection."

Taken from the introduction to the web distribution of Melanie Phillips' talk, there is an audio file (MP3) available at this location: http://www.meforum.org/2665/islamists-turned-world-upside-down

# # #

Israel's Historic Truth

Israel did not spring into being after the Holocaust; it was the historic homeland of the Jewish people going back to ancient times.  The unique Jewish entitlement to Israel is not just a Biblical story but historic fact.  The Jews are the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national homeland.  They first entered the land around 1300 BCE, living under a tribal confederation.  By 1000 BCE they established a united monarchy under King David, ruling themselves independently and continuously for over four hundred years--more than a millennium before Islam was established in the seventh century and the Arabs invaded.  In 586 BCE, the Jews were conquered and driven out of their kingdom, later returning to rebuild it only to be defeated and finally exiled again in 70 CE.

Even then, the Jews maintained an unbroken presence in the land of Israel through centuries of Roman, Christian and Ottoman occupation, with Jewish majorities in several towns.  There was a brief resumption of Jewish rule in Jerusalem after a revolt against the Romans i 135 CE and again in 614 CE; by the ninth century, Jews had re-established communities in Tiberias; in the eleventh century, in Gaza; in the thirteenth century, Jewish families restored the community of Safed; in the sixteenth century, refugees from the Spanish Inquisition led to a substantial expansion of the Jewish presence in Safed, Hebron, and Tiberias; from the mid nineteenth century onwards, there was a Jewish majority in Jerusalem.  [1, pp. 55-56]

Who is occupying whose land today?

Far be it from me to argue that question here, but following from Melanie Phillips' summary, one may start by lookiing over the archeological record online at these locations:

http://www.allaboutthejourney.org/israel-archaeology.htm

Let's begin our look at Israel archaeology with the "Merneptah Stele" (also known as the Israel Stele), which is an upright stone slab measuring over seven feet tall that contains carved hieroglyphic text dating to approximately 1230 BC. This Egyptian monument describes the military victories of Pharaoh Merneptah and includes the earliest mention of "Israel" outside the Bible.

http://www.starways.net/lisa/essays/exodus.html

Today, the picture is different. The invaders of the Early Bronze/Middle Bronze Interchange seem to have appeared out of nowhere in the Sinai and the Negev. Initially, they moved up into the transjordan, and then crossed over north of the Dead Sea, conquering Canaan and wiping out the inhabitants. Of course, since we are dealing with cultural remnants and not written records, we don't know that the previous inhabitants were all killed. Some of them may have remained, but if so, they adopted enough of the newcomers' culture to "disappear" from the archeological record.

Two archeologists have already gone on record identifying the invaders as the Israelites.

http://www.jewishmuseum.net/collections/archeology.html

When the Hebrews came into Palestine, they replaced the Canaanite culture with their own and the Miller Museum also owns pieces of pottery that are artifacts used by ancient Hebrews after the Canaanites had been pushed out of most of Palestine. The shape of these vessels differs from earlier examples.

Where are the Canaanites and so many others whose artifacts remain in the earth's record of inhabitation but whose cultures have passed beyond retrieving?

That question too I will leave rhetorical.

For any more enthused about getting into the mess, especially the mess being made and approved of, so far, by leftward revisionism and its abhorent compromises, there may be this conflict to return to and reconsider in review:

Meanwhile, in Jerusalem Hebrew University's Dr. Eilat Mazar, along with representatives from the Committee Against the Destruction of Antiquities, was in the Israeli High Court of Justice attempting to halt the work on the Temple Mount being conducted by the Muslim Waqf, the religious trust charged with oversight of the location. The excavation, a trench 500 meters long and 1.5 meters deep, is, according to the complainants, "causing irreversible damage to antiquities and archaeological artifacts of the greatest importance . . , is being carried out illegally, [and] entails damage to ground layers, some of which may have been in place since the first Temple stood there 3,000 years ago."

The effrontery of this recent, but not isolated, act by the Waqf is made all the more troubling by the fact that the archeological contempt shown by the trust reflects their attitude that a Jewish historical connection to the site is only apocryphal, that, in the same way that El-Haj denies a Jewish component to the archeology of Israel, the Waqf's oversight of the Temple Mount has contributed to an effort, in pursuit of the Palestinian's nationalistic cause, to erase or obscure Judaism and replace it with a Muslim historical narrative which predates a Jewish one.

Source: http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/4255

The world expects criminals to deny, destroy, ignore, or hide evidence, not Ph.D's.

Reference

1. Phillips, Melanie.  The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth, and Power.  New York and London: Encounter Books, 2010.

# # #

Iranian Regime Sentenced to Saberi-ah

I have a friend who lies to impress and to entertain himself and others.  The forms are exaggeration and yarning.  For example, this morning, he told me about a thunderhead beating up toward his work location from the south, and while he described the wind picking up and the air smelling like rain, I was checking my favorite realtime weather radar.

"Radar says the skies are clear north to Pittsburgh and south to Raleigh," I told him.

He either could not or would not hear that truth, choosing at some emotional and psychological level to block all but his "own private Idaho" of an unfolding drama.  He believed or wanted me to believe that storm clouds were gathering and closing in above his head, and the wind was rising.

He wanted my approval, buy-in, indulgence, and obedience in light of the willow-o-whisps that bind cooperative, friendly (so far) relationships.

About twenty minutes later at the tying off of the call, I reminded him that the skies looked clear down to Norfolk, and he responded in line with his threatening cloud story, "Yeah, it looks like they're clearing off."

No harm done.

I got in a little observation about the man and about closed and open communication systems.

The yarn spinner wanted to wrap my perception of his reality in his invention, a bid for heightened attention, interest, and sympathy--also a bid for power.

Fortunately, I had Internet-borne weather radar.

---

All well know that bullies are cowards and cowards as often as not liers, and altogether bullies, cowards, and liers become collectively thugs. 

Few among the articulate may know as much better than Roxana Saberi, an American beauty queen, also an American-Iranian reporter once based in Tehran, the daughter of an American-Iranian father and a Japanese mother, in all, as Dickens might put it, the very picture of a cosmopolitan, well educated, and thoroughly modern--broadly Judeo-Christianized, Greco-Romanized--woman of the world whose life, in all of fifteen minutes, was turned upside down by the scrabbling and vainglorious nincompoops who, considering themselves the defenders of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, seem to have prized for their sadism a young women eager, at first, to prove herself innocent beneath their gaze.

Browbeaten, cajoled, isolated, threatened by threats of harm to herself and loved others, Saberi's kangaroo trials have her at first seeking to placate her tormenters, who managed to keep her in the infamous Evin Prison for three months, January 31 to May 11, 2009, on charges of espionage every bit as imaginary as my friend's impending early morning thunderstorm. 

Now that I had been deprived of freedom, I valued it more than ever.  Freedom to interview people and to write a book about them without being thrown in jail.  Freedom to tell my parents my whereabouts.  Freedom to use the bathroom when I wanted, to read a book, to have a pen and paper.  Freedom to walk without a blindfold and to shut off the lights at night.  Freedom from coercion to make a false confession and to spy in exchange for my release.  The right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, to remain silent, to have a lawyer. [1, p. 113]

How those privileged to live in the open societies take the fundamentals for granted!

Moreover, the same seldom delve into the horror attending the development and imposition of truly isolated and sealed communicating environments. 

In Iran's Kafkaesque atmosphere, officers of the state hide their names, guards do not give theirs, the prosecution whips up charges to strut across the stage of a political theater it hopes to sustain with "white torture" or psychological illusion, intimidation, and leverage.

I have found the best and most simple template for much of what goes on within the Islamic Small Wars to be the child's tale known as "The Emperor's New Clothes." 

In the Islamic civil psychoses, from Pakistan to Somalia and points Middling East, perhaps too few children dare to speak up and too many cowed adults conveniently nod their heads, resigned not merely  going along with the cascading lies of lost and needy men armored in black leather as well as clerical robes, but also "cooperating" and becoming themselves the instruments of the devils from which they would otherwise flee.

---

What a difference a year makes!

What the critic has said: "The film is careful to avoid explicit political statement, but its reticence makes its critique of the Iranian regime all the more devastating." [2]

The trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gLq3E4pRuU

The recently released film by Bahman Ghobadi, Roxana Saberi's boyfriend (also, the two share screenwriting credit on the property), No One Knows About Persian Cats, hits two marks for existing: 1) the atmosphere of the story is current, not comfortably historic, romanticized, fondly remembered in those old cabaret, footloose, and happy days ways; 2) the release, as with Saberi's book, comes out just ahead of the anniversary of Saberi's liberation.

On this day a year ago, close enough, one love bug languished in prison, and the other, figuratively at least, possibly literally as well, walked in anguish outside its walls.

Roxana Saberi's father, Reza, also bears mention in what looks like a coterie of honest to God--truly, honest and to God--freedom fighters. 

While the father plays a noble role in the daughter's book, little mention--perhaps I missed it--is made of his vocation in living, which turns out that of an intellectual's writer in his own right [3]:

"Throughout history, humankind has been working, often subconsciously, toward discovering unity behind diversity and order behind apparent chaos. Somehow the universal consciousness, which is Existence itself, informs human beings, whether savage, children, uneducated or learned, that beneath the differences there are similarities, and behind the many there hides the One. Human beings have made this advancement toward unity through mythology, religion, philosophy, science, humanities, and also through mystical experiences."

Source: http://saberibooks.com/non-fiction.html

I'll gamble that the William James, Joseph Campbell, Abraham Maslow and other authors represented on my shelves are the same James, Campbell, and Maslow (I'll throw in the rare name drop of Ahmad Tafazzoli [4] too, so long as true Persian culture seems the thing and global associating helpful) on Reza Saberi's shelves.

While its gadflies and goads operate best elsewhere, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, toodling along in its own bipolar theonukedom, continues to maintain its pitiful yarn about Saberi's role in its dismal life.  Chances are good, however, that the regime has chosen not to notice (officially) its role in Saberi's now colorful, real, and truthful handiwork, which recently published and distributed by Harper Collins will sit high on bookshelves worldwide for decades to come, witness to a regime proven dependent on lying most of all to itself.

Cited Reference

1. Saberi, Roxana.  Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran.  New York: Harper, 2010.

2. Scott, A. O.  "No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009)".  Review.  The New York Times, April 16, 2010: http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/movies/16noone.html

3. Saberi, Reza: http://saberibooks.com/

4. Daryaee, Touraj and Mahmoud Omidsalar.  The Spirit of Wisdom (Menog i Xrad): Essays in Memory of Ahmad Tafazzoli.  Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2004.

Also Recommended

Moaveni, Azadeh.  Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran.  New York: Random House, 2009.

Nafisi, Azar.  Things I've Been Silent About.  New York: Random House, 2008.

# # #

Out of the Fog of Words

The Talmud is second only to the Bible in its importance and influence as a source book of Jewish religion. The term “Talmud” (literally “study”) is generic: there are actually two Talmuds, the larger and more authoritative Babylonian Talmud containing the teachings of the Babylonian Jewish sages (the so-called Amoraim) who lived in the third to fifth centuries, and the smaller Jerusalem (or Palestinian) Talmud which presents the teachings of the sages who lived in the Land of Israel in the third and fourth centuries. Both Talmuds are structured in the form of commentaries on the Mishna, the code of traditional law compiled about 200 C.E. by Rabbi Y’huda haNasi in the Galilee, which contains the teachings of the earlier sages (the so-called Tannaim) who lived in the first and second centuries C.E. In distinction from the Mishna, which is always brief and succinct, the voluminous Talmudic commentary appended to it is called the Gemara. The Jerusalem Talmud contains ca. 800,000 words; the Babylonian ca. 2,500,000 words. In the two Talmuds references are made to ca. two hundred Tannaim and no less than two thousand Amoraim. Both Talmuds are written partly in Hebrew and partly in Aramaic; the latter was the colloquial tongue in Palestine and in Babylonia in those days. [1]

Note that minor term: "Palestinian Talmud."

While the Middle East Conflict may have been cast in 1948 as a fight about land, it may have been always--and from long before 1948--an argument about literature.  In fact, while scholars involved with studies of culture and religion have been well aware of the breadth of commentary and expressive work churned up and out of each domain, the same would seem a dimension of which the general public has been and remains blissfully but cursedly unaware.  Such makes for a particularly hazy sense of causality in conflicts birthed on the engines of intellectual drivers.

There's no need for that old ignorance today. 

For any with the slightest interest in Islam, Dar-us-Salam Publications may quite handily provide access to a body of literature " . . . free from sectarianism and in accordance with the Qur'an and Sunnah."  Web address: http://www.dar-us-salam.com/about_us.htm

From the memorable experience of it, I may heartily recommend spending a few hours to days with Saifure Rahman al-Mubarakpuri's Saudi prize winning history Ar-Raheeq Al-Makhtum (The Sealed Nectar): Memoirs of the Noble Prophet, which features a witnessed account of the descent of the Angel Gabriel.

For interest in Judaism and Jewish culture and life, I know of no central publishing operation equivalent to Dar-us-Salam (and if you should know of one, please provide me with that information), but one may start  making rounds with the following: http://www.judaism.com/books/index.asp and http://www.artscroll.com.

Of course there are many other portals through which to encounter through language Judaism and Jewish culture--off the top: The Jewish Virtual Library (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/), the Wikipedia start page titled "Judaism" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism) -- just follow the headers beneath the Star of David -- and for any in the Tribe finding himself a little bit lost, there is, happily, Judaism 101 (http://www.jewfaq.org/index.htm) and Aish.com (http://www.aish.com/).

While our main and modern issue may no longer involve the provision of access to a diverse and immense corpus of cultural and religious literature, it certainly involves something near to it: access to time, and, related, encouragement of the love of reading for hours on end.

Who has time?

Who would today want to spend it reading?

If you should be so lucky as to account yourself two affirmatives, look around and ask "Who else?"

For the few who do have time, focus counts too, and that's become a hard thing to maintain, funded for it or not, in our fast-paced and media-soaked intellectual environment wired tight by global communications.

What makes this most annoying is that while people will kill one another, en masse, over matters confined largely to their heads, interest in "content of mind" seems confined to a relative handful of pundits and scholars when the same should become the province of every teacher of language and comparative literature and of some interest to every generally educated reader.

The origins of attitudes -- or beliefs and how we feel about them -- may be hazy at a glance across many dimensions in living, but all have their grounding in something one has experienced, heard, or read and then synthasized and revised.

The origins of law too have evolved out of ancient oral and written traditions, and one may well follow threads from the well known Moses to the fairly well known Maimonides to the positively obscure Lassa Oppenheim, an early 20th Century Cambridge professor, also Jewish, responsible for the world's first comprehensive and still influential English-language volume on international law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._F._L._Oppenheim).

In this most blessed day, one may read from a body of literature firmly established between the ancient Moses and the modern perceptive legal scholar Oppenheim.  Not that I wish to tackle the Mishnah, but the same is as available for purchase in English as The Sealed Nectar, and here is a URL to it: http://www.artscroll.com/mishnah.html.

Reference

1. Patai, Raphael.  Gates To the Old City: A Book of Jewish Legends.  Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981.

2. Al-Mubarakpuri, Saifur Rahman.  Al-Makhtum, Ar-Raheeq (The Sealed Nectar): Memoirs of the Noble Prophet. 

# # #

Patai, God, Legend

No such proximity between man and God is conceivable within Hebrew tradition, which constitutes the mainstream of Biblical and later Jewish thinking.  God is above and man is below; God is one and man is many; the distance between them is not merely great, it is absolute; the relation between them is that between the spiritual All and a speck of dust.  The one and only feature of virtue with which the Jewish narrative can endow its hero is his extraordinary ability to understand what God wants of him, and his equally extraordinary readiness to obey every divine command.  Typologically, almost all the Biblical and later Jewish heroes conform to this single pattern: they are heroes of piety, giants of belief, masters to obedience.  Their one and only heroic feat is to perceive and obey God's command.

Thus the Biblical and later Jewish hero is only partly mythical; mostly he is legendary.  In contrast to the great human and semihuman heroes of pagan polytheistic traditions who are totally and full-bloodedly mythical, the typical heroes of the Biblical and later Jewish narratives are of a pseudo-mythical character in which the legendary features predominate. [1]

My first encounter with scholar Raphael Patai: The Arab Mind [2], which I read around the time I started this blog and its Internet-based venture into the Islamic Small Wars.  With the companion, The Jewish Mind [3], I made little way, hanging a bookmark in an early chapter for months before admitting temporary defeat, vowing to return on some more leisured day.

Truth is, I could not have more leisured days, but of all the possible arts and letters activities laid out on one's table for choosing, reading at length may rank among the most challenging: one has to set aside all those other possibilities, including the whole smorgassbord of contemporary social communicating channels and the behaviors associated with them. 

Add back to the new distractions the old one that entailed closing one's doors and letting the world pass by for the next turn of a page.

With a book, especially an engaging, great, and lengthy one, one may and must still disappear, bidding all competitors for attention a temporary and interminable stay by perceptual social cyber standards, . 

Where is he? 

What is he doing? 

Is he still reading?

If carving time for reading (at length) has become an issue for post-Internet culture, imagine how Patai himself may have had to experience time--whole oceans of it--to produce his own formidable record of accomplishment.

Born a little more than 100 years ago, Patai's Wikipedia brief credits him with the authorship of more than 40 seminal works [4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Patai 

A more detailed description of Patai's prodigious output has been provided in an obituary by Eva Hentschel:

At the outset of his career in America, Patai was approaching 40 and at the height of his powers. For close on five ensuing decades he issued a spate of publications, over 30 volumes in all, including a number of important editorial commissions: Herzl's diaries, an Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel (1971), and even a series of handbooks on modern Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

It was only two months after his arrival in New York that Patai received an unexpected letter from Robert Graves. This took the form of an appreciative commentary on Man and Temple in Ancient Jewish Myth and Ritual (1947), a revised version of the earlier Man and Earth in Hebrew Custom, Belief and Legend and, incidentally, the first of Patai's books to be published in English.

And on Hentschel goes, for with Patai, one never lacks for having one more good thing to say.

Should I read through the 800 plus pages of Gates of the Old City, I will claim that a minor accomplishment, but forgive me if I then overlook mention of the author for whom translating and compiling the same was but a schoolboy's project.

From Hentschel's obituary (I recommend the full reading--the excerpts here are the filigree):

Raphael Patai, anthropologist and historian; born Budapest 22 November 1910; Instructor of Hebrew Language, Hebrew University, Jerusalem 1938- 42, Research Fellow in Ethnology 1943-47; Professor of Anthropology, Dropsie College, Philadelphia 1948-57; Lecturer in Anthropology, New York University 1951-53; Director of Research, Herzl Institute 1956-71; Professor of Anthropology, Fairleigh Dickinson University 1966-76; married four times (two daughters); died Tucson, Arizona 20 July 1996.

Daughters Jennifer and Daphne [6] would seem to have proven formidable scholars themselves, but one may wonder what twists the contemporary communications, information, and media tsunamis have had on their journies.

This blog's readers know the prelude to my Sabbath: I shut down the computer before Kiddush.

Here on a Sunday afternoon with a volume of stories, access to which may be credited to Raphael Patai, comes another sort of prelude, indeed a gateway, but not to an old city--rather one reinvented and renewed.

Reference

1. Patai, Raphael.  Gates to the Old City: A Book of Jewish Legends.  Introduction, xix.  Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981.

2. Patai, Raphael.  The Arab Mind.  New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973.

3. Patai, Raphael.  The Jewish Mind.  New York: Jason Aronson, 1977.

4. Wikipedia.  "Raphael Patai": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Patai

5. Hentschel, Eva.  "Obituary: Raphael Patai."  The Independent.  August 7, 1996: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-raphael-patai-1308610.html

6. Wikipedia: "Daphne Patai": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Patai; Dr. Jennifer P. Schneider: http://www.jenniferschneider.com/

Other Reference

Thomas, Robert McG., Jr.  "Raphael Patai, 85, a Scholar of Jewish and Arab Cultures."  Obituary.  The New York Times, July 25, 1996: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/25/arts/raphael-patai-85-a-scholar-of-jewish-and-arab-cultures.html

# # #

Out of Multitudes

To be a Jew, then, is to be born of those two escapes:  into the desert and into the Book.  Exile and text created us far more than genealogical descent from Abraham or the high priests, and throughout our history we have always turned back to these two concepts for strength, inspiration, and rebirth.  There is no convincing archaeological evidence for the flight from Egypt.  Evidence that the Hebrews were even enslaved in Egypt is scarce.  But the Exodus story doesn't need to be true to serve its purpose.  Whether divinely inspired or written by a series of editors over hundreds of years, the Torah narrative has its normative function, summed up succinctly by my bar mitzvah portion: you owe a debt to the God who sent you wandering, who made you into a people, who promises you won't wander forever. [1]

Charles London points out early in Far From Zion: In Search of a Global Jewish Community that not only Jews left Egypt with Moses: "A mixed multitude also went up with them" (Exodus 12:38).  London puts the population in exile, at more than a million souls, all transformed, Jews and the mixed multitudes that joined them, into one nation with the receiving of the Torah.

Cited Reference

1. London, Charles.  Far From Zion: In Search of a Global Jewish Community.  New York: Harper Collins, 2009, p. 8.

# # #

Author Recommended: Laqueur

Alpha:

"I belong to the last generation of Jews with conscious memories of growing up in Weimar Germany and under the Nazis." [1a]

Omega:

"I tried to forget quickly all I learned about the theory of autobiography--which was not too difficult.  But one quotation stuck in my mind.  It is from the preface of the autobiography of a German writer named Karl Immermann entitled Memorabilia (1840), and it says, "My life does not seem to me of sufficient importance to bring it on the market in all its details.  I shall deal only with my encounters with history."  This translation is unfortunately much too vague; Immermann used an untranslatable turn of phrase, "wo die Geschichte ihren Durchzug durch mich hielt," which, literally translated, means "where history marched through me."

History, fortunately, never "marched through me," but it affected my life more profoundly than Immermann and his generation . . . .  [1b]

The tickets to the front row seats to history do not get hotter than those held by Walter Laqueur.

My first encounter with the work of this possibly now irrascible old fellow--in his 30's in the 1950's, he has got to be in his 90's today, and by his own account does not suffer fools lightly--came through his book Guerrilla: A historical and critical study at a time when my interest in terrorism had crystalized into a leftward sympathy for the economically exploited.  Never interested in the real deal, I had wondered what to do about the excessive corporate autonomy that ended in disasters like Bhopal, which Wikipedia now labels the "Bhopal Disaster" [2] and the massive business "downsizing", "rightsizing", "reorganization", and "reengineering" of the early 1990's. 

I wrote a bad screenplay.

Capitalism continued coughing up periodical and near criminal--and criminal--economic disasters. 

Precisely how Laqueur's Guerrilla claimed its stake in my library (next to Demaris' Brothers in Blood [3]), I don't know, but it's held its place on my shelves for at least 20 years, and its presence provided a small but much appreciated signpost as my attitudes and interests swung with post-9/11 American culture toward renewed interest in conflict and terrorism; also, while personal experience brought me back to the existential, perhaps even mysterious business of being Jewish.

Speaking here as an avid reader, Walter Laqueur invariably provides from first sentence to last both "ease and tease" in conveying the essentials of what he has to say.  From the preface to Guerrilla:

This book deals with guerrilla warfare; it does not aim at presenting a universal theory, for such a theory would be either exceedingly vague or exceedingly wrong.  The author of an excellent book on the Cuban revolution noted some years ago that in view of its unique character the events in Cuba were a subject for the historian rather than the sociologist.  The same is true of most guerrilla wars: a tank is always a tank, but guerrilla wars differ greatly from one another." [4, vii].

And into a rich telling of the ways one goes.

For this Jewish wastral in his mid-fifties and reconnecting with, in essence, the ancestral, Walter Laqueur provides a tour through a part of the Jewish experience most congruent with Jewish modernity, which is to say his Jewish identity propelled a journey from the Weimar Republic in the 1930's to Palestine through the birthing of Israel and beyond, and on to London and Washington in ways inseparable from it, yet without making too much of a deal of it--or much of a deal of it at all.

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go, Laqueur's memoir, covers a most tumultous period in history, from the poisonous anchoring of World War II to, with some ellision, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, although the main part might be said to cover the author's youth to maturity.  With such a long life, there's room for a second remembrance, and such would be welcomed here. 

Cited Reference

1. Laqueur, Walter.  Thursday's Child Has Far to Go: A Memoir of the Journeying Years.  New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992. A) p. xii, B) p. 401-402.

2. Wikipedia.  "Bhopal Disaster": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

3. Demaris, Ovid.  Brothers in Blood: The International Terrorist Network.  New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977.

4. Laqueur, Walter.  Guerrilla: A historical and critical study.  Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1976.

Other Reference

Laqueur, Walter: http://www.laqueur.net/

Laqueur, Walter.  Dying for Jeruslaem: The Past, Present and Future of the Holiest City.  Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2006.

Laqueur, Walter. The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Wikipedia.  "Walter Laqueur": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Laqueur

# # #

Shah's Early Memoir and the Nerve of Some Women . . . .

Outside our sealed bubble of tolerant Muslim culture, the Islamic world was changing.  Some years before the Iranian revolution, our Qur'an teacher became fascinated by the ideas of Ayatollah Khomeini.  He was hurriedly dismissed, and he eventually returned to Iran to study in a religious seminary.  When the thirst for Islamic revolution had stirred his heart sufficiently, he decided he had been brought to our household for a purpose: to witness the depravity and error into which our branch of the family of the Prophet had sunk.  For a while, we children were hurried past the thick laurel bushes in the driveway, in case our erstwhile Qur'an instructor was lurking there, ready to attack us.

What unacceptable religous ideas had he encountered in our home?  What teachings did he find so detrimental to the hearts of the faithful?  Perhaps Baghawi of Herat's sayings of the Prophet, which adjured one to think for oneself rather than conform to externals without question:

"One hour's teaching is better than a whole night of prayer."

"Trust in God, but tie your camel first."

"The ink of the learned is holier than the blood of the martyr."

"You ask me to curse unbelievers, but I was not sent to curse."

"I order you to help an oppressed person, whether they are Muslim or not."

"Women are the twin halves of men."

These were the values I grew up with.  This was the Islam I bought into. [1, pp. 11-12]

Men write books too, and I would slight the courage of none for that, but for the brassiest of the big balls, credit on occasion the nerve of some women.

Saira Shah's book, The Storyteller's Daughter, from which I have quoted for the above teaser, tells both the memories and the contemporary experience, including experience in the Taliban presence, of the progeny to a kind of a royalty and post-colonial dispossession.

Early on in her adventure in memoir, Shah asks "Does the Afghanistan of our myths really exist?  Are we still Afghans? And if Iam not an Afghan, what am I?"

While Shah finds evidence to support the family's mythos, her question posed in 2003, the year of her book's publication, remains cutting edge: if I am not Jewish, if you are not Christian, if he is not Lakota, or she not Sunni--and relate that back to a patch on the Big Blue Marble--what are we?

"Modern" would be my suggestion.

Should that feel vague or discomfitting--it would seem to be a recycling historical state of self-assessment--try "cosmopolitan".

Or that old Jewish, multi-monotheist. and way out of copyright standby puzzled about worldwide: "good."

Much of the world, this to the misfortune of the cosmopolitan, good, and modern Mister or Ms. of the World, hasn't the cultural or intellectual breadth granted either by affluence and education, mindful pluck and education, or public education (and educated discipline) associated with secular educations to shatter the suggestion of a limited and sharply drawn caricature of the self confined by its lack of access to new language metonymy and behavior. 

Worse, many who do have such access to foreign thought may hew nonetheless to the most chauvanist perception of their role among their own, denying the spirit of, say, the accumulation of several American pedigrees in education and returning straight to the comforts of a familiar hate or prejudice, a bent from which they may then seek to lead their more impressionable and less armored "street".

The movie Amelia Earhart has recently opened (to smaller than expected box office too), but as long as that pioneer's name, if not ghost, is in the air, one may suggest that in Shah and others, whom I will mention shortly, the spirit for flying beyond fixed horizons remains strong.  It is a good thing, for the times in Islam and all around its edges demand it--may the men among Islamic Moderns rise for a match.

We carry our myths--I like to say the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves--with us all our lives, but while they may inform our sensibilities, they are inevitably too packaged, small, and fixed to define them: inevitably, for better sometimes, for worse too often, we diverge.

I don't know how the next two-thirds of Saira Shah's book will be for cogent insight and vicarious experience, but I'm enjoying the writing and the spirit of courage, curiosity, and introspective inquiry evident in the voice.

In my library, The Storyteller's Daughter will have for company work by Sarah Chayes, a Pashto-speaking Jewish American woman who has entrepreneured in small manufacturing for the good of the economy serving Muslims south of Kabul; Anne Jones, an American on a post-Taliban story (still on it too); Azadeh Moaveni, now an Iranian Muslim reporting from London for Time magazine ; Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Muslim Somali liberated through Danish hospitality and living today a most secular and modern post-modern life among security guards in the west; and Nafisi Azar, an Iranian national whose combined literary, personal, and political experiences have made Baltimore a more suitable home for her spirit than Tehran under the current regime.

Cited Reference

1. Shah, Saira.  The Storyteller's Daughter.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Other Reference

Chayes, Sarah.  The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban.  New York: The Penguin Press, 2006.

Hirsi Ali, Ayaan.  Infidel.  New York: Free Press, Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Jones, Ann.  Web: http://www.annjonesonline.com/index.html

Jones, Ann.  Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan.  New York: Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt and Company), 2006.

Moaveni, Azadeh. Web: http://www.azadeh.info/

Moaveni, Azadeh.  Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran.  New York: Random House, 2009.

Nafisi, Azar.  Things I've Been Silent About.  New York: Random House, 2008.

# # #

Ben-Gurion and Me

I know.

I am no Ben-Gurion.

We may be connected by a great religion and ancient traditions, but no more so than any of this earth's other 14 million Jews and their countless ancestral generations.  And we may both have taken an interest in the business of being Jewish, but that would seem a necessity amid the world's periodic outbrakes of insensible anti-Semitism and persecution.

However, there is this in which I may feel close to Israel's Old Man:

" . . . Every day he would diligently record his expenses in his notebook.  Often left penniless, he was obliged to beg a pound from a friend to get through the month.  Yet in addition to the usual food, kerosene, cigarettes, and newspapers, Ben-Gurion had added another secret item to his expenditures.  He had begun buying books like a man possessed.  Several times a week, Ben Gurion would record in his diary the list of books he had purchased.  In January 1922, he flung himself at books on Judaism; he asked a friend to buy him Springer's history of art and a number of German books on questions of state; from a Jerusalem shop he ordered books on the geography of Palestine, a biography of Jesus, books of Latin and Armenian grammar; from Germany he received books on Christianity, Palestinian archaeology, and the history and geography of the Middle East.  During his first attack of book-buying, in the spring of 1922, he concentrated systematically on a number of subjects: Judaism, Christianity, the history of the ancient civilizations of the Middle East, the origins of Zionism, the writings of the great socialists, the history of the Arabs, and textbooks on political problems.  On 20 March, he counted his books, and recorded proudly: "The number of my books is: German - 219; English - 340; Arabic - 13; French - 29; Hebrew - 140; Latin - 7; Greek - 2; Russian - 7; Turkish - 2; dictionaries of various languages - 15.  Total - 775 volumes." [1-48]

For many years, I lived a short drive from one of the country's chain thrifts, an operation that recycled everything that could be in the wake of changing fashions, waistlines, and the tragedy that is death.  In the worst years, my poorest, I would say in the voice of the protagonist child (Haley Joel Osment) in the Bruce Willis movie The Sixth Sense, "I wear dead people's clothing"--perhaps I did, or as whatever I bought from that era no longer fits my own expanding gut, perhaps such were merely outgrown.  Be that as it may, the Village Thrift recycled books, 1/2 price on Tuesdays back then, I recall, with first editions topping out at $1.90 before the cut.

I had found where the used booksellers culled their own stock for mark-up several hundred percent.

Armed with both an Access database and the popular "CollectorZ" software (and a barcode reader of grabbing incoming ISBN numbers), I too am counting books.

The numbers are not so important, of course.

In an infamous Al-Jazeera-hosted debate, Arab-American psychologist Wafa Sultan noted this: "Who told you that they are “People of the Book”? They are not the People of the Book, they are people of many books. All the useful scientific books that you have today are theirs, the fruit of their free and creative thinking."

Thank you, Wafa, but we could not have done it without the Muslim scholars of the Iberian Penninsula (Jews produced the translations of medical literature from Arabic to Spanish), but, dolled up here and with many thanks, "The People of Many Books" has stuck with me.

As each book must have been for David Ben-Gurion a deep and rich portal into the world and world view of its author, so has each has been to me, including Michael Bar-Zohar's biography of Ben-Gurion--and what a world his was, with some part of the people working in the groves and swamps of old Palestine, others struggling to make sense of European craftsmanship in an environment not yet conducive to as much.  Edmund James de Rothschild may have purchased some land, founded a winery or two, and launched new businesses in the region, but the young Ben-Gruen" and others arrived to undertake the labor at miserable wages and for the most uncertain of futures imaginable.

Amazon--how I got that book!--had listed just two of the Bar-Zohar "New Millennium" translations available last month, so I've paid a pretty penny for it, but have had a grand tour through it too and caught a glimpse both of Israel's founding personalities and the fundamental military, political, and spiritual building blocks of the Jewish state's existence.

I am thankful for the experience.

Each month, I make my library a little more Jewish--i.e., although the print is very small, I have a Torah, a history of Israel (Benny Morris's 1948--there will be others), a siddur (prayer book), and my candles--as well, perhaps, as more international.  There are quite a few books here concerned with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Somalia, and if you add in the coffee table books from the photography quarter, add in America, France, Paris, and Asia.

As a resource, the library outgrew my ability to read through it many years ago, but then books around my place fulfill many duties: they entertain and instruct, provide literally off-the-shelf reference, and, not so oddly, they relate one to the other too.

In the old apartment, ruined for habitation by a fire elsewhere in the building, I made sure to keep Kawabata next to Hemingway, the principle of influences and themes applying to the shelving.

Here in this still new space (after three years, it has just become familiar): library chaos, but all the friends are out in plain view and with the making of catalog cards and the clearing of cluttering items from each bookcase, one at a time over time, they're each finding their own place in a universe quite their own.

Reference

1. Bar-Zohar, Michael.  Ben-Gurion: A Biography.  Peretz Kidron, Translator.  The New Millennium Edition. Tel-Aviv: Magal Books, 1978.

2. MEMRI.  Attacks on Arab-American Wafa Sultan: Islamist Sheikh on Al-Jazeera Calls Her Heretic; Syrian Sermon Calls Her Infidel."  Special Dispatch - No. 1107, March 7, 2006: http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=sd&ID=SP110706&Page=archives.  MEMRI video location on YouTube, poster "itayzil", "Arab-American Psychologist Wafa Sultan," posted August 14, 2006: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1_aypp_5uI:

# # #

Fall Reading from Spring and Summer 2009

Societies that know not the art of reading are doomed.

Nothing contains and transfers culture in its totality quite like a language and its literature.

Unfortunately, so I have reason, Internet time and read-a-book time are not compatible.

The system on which you're reading this moves at light speed.  It produces a constant present of continues subhistorical event although so many events may seem historical the day they make the news, which is the day they have their greatest effect on perception.  Orwell's observation comes to mind: "Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia."  Often enough, the news that most sticks in our craw turns out that which we have least patience for investigating: quick, on to the next news item!

Books, on the other had, draw from the dark and deep wells of time, and each contains a part of the universe of its author's mind, itself a reflection of thousands of facets of social reality and, time and again, a conduit as well of nature and the divine.

My list here is a grab bag.

No one has paid me to lock on a certain beam and read through its cyberspace and realspace bookshelves, and yet there themes evident.  For example, having been for decades the most assimilated of Jews, this past year brought me to confront what that means in both a personal and communal sense.  In that I inherited the small library kept by my parents, it took just two steps from my bed to reach for Sholom Aleichem's collection of short stories, The Old Country.  Here is a spoiler of an excerpt, but one as cogent to contemporary politics as may be:

"The next examination," wrote Benjamin in his last letter, "is my Day of Judgment, because if I get less than a ninety-four I shall not be able to get in, and if I can't get in now I shall have to stay over another year.  And who knows that will happen next year?  Maybe next it will be even worse.  What will I do then?  What will happen to me?  Why did I ever have to work so hard, wear myself out like this?  Study so hard, starve day after day, freeze in unheated rooms and spend so many sleepless nights?  I am not the only one to ask these questions.  There are many others like me--Jewish boys--who stayed over from last year and can't get in because their average is not quite high enough.  I don't know what I shall do . . ."

Yisroel the shammes went around in a daze.  He could not understand why Benjamin's letters suddenly should have become so melancholy.  He asked Yarachmiel-Moishe to write to Benjamin and ask him what he meant by "average" and "ninety-four."  In short, he asked Benjamin to write and explain everything, and not to worry, but rely on the Eternal One who could do everything.  And the main thing still was the he should remember he was a Jew, and if the Lord willed, all would be well . . ."

My mother, Molly, arrived at Ellis Island from Poland when she was four years old.  While I was growing up, she taught Yiddish at the Chaim Weizmann School--otherwise a K-12 elementary schools, in Silver Spring, Maryland on Sundays, and I would play the piano for her music classes as well as an annual show.  As a child, one thinks nothing of such an excursion--and Fiddler on the Roof, but of course that's just part of the routine for the People of Many Books as well as the makers of much fine and lively art.

In adulthood, however, and late for me, one may see it: the necessity of leaving Germany and Poland--and for others Russia and Ethiopia and other less welcoming quarters across the skin of the earth--and coming to American to be both one's self as a Jew as well as a person that is "just like everyone else."

With the Middle East continuously in the news, anti-Semitism rampant across the Internet, and conversion movements chipping away at the goodness and normality of just 15 million people, spending a little time with Sholom Aleichem and the characters of the shtettle seemed this winter most appropriate for me.  Now here it is summer, and may you too have long days, especially if you have been remiss and the Jews are your own, for perhaps dwelling briefly in that old country's zeitgeist.

------

Aleichem, Sholom.  The Old Country: Collected Stories of Sholom Aleichem.  New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1946.

Jewish life post-Holocaust has changed although cause would seem muddied by the horrific depopulation of European and Russian Jewry through mass murder and persecution.  Reading Sholom Aleichem frames not the essential Jewish life, I think, certainly not the life of ancient Judea, but the part defined by aggregaton, anti-Semitism, uncertain status and persecution, and, in too many places too often, unpredictable violence.

If I have decoded AISH's calls for reversion and redemption about right, one might succeed too well at being "just like everyone else."  The Old Country: Collected Stories of Sholom Aleichem and its companion Tevye's Daughters provide for memory and spirit many reminders about being different, not quite like everyone else, not better--oh goodness no--but refracted and resolved through the quintessentials of the Jewish experience.

Gould, Terry.  Murder Without Borders: Dying for the Story in the World's Most Dangerous Places.  Random House Canada, 2009.

"Guillermo Bravo was killed by people who saw they were at risk of losing the goose who laid the golden egg," she said.  "And when I was 'goose' and 'golden egg,' a lot of people in Huila know which goose and which egg." (p. 53).

Every gangster--and all of similar ilk--has a reputation to uphold, and every reporter worth some salt will cover the bombings and the murders.  How deep and how far they may go into the works--personalities, fronts, payoffs, bribes, etc.--has some to do with the demands of conscience, idealism, and love: if there's a practical lesson in Terry Gould's illuminating journey into the lives of whacked journalists, it may be that those who dare to jam up their subject's businesses catch a little extra scrutiny for it.  I'll list the names of writers covered in Murder Without Borders but would note far more interesting the nouns surrounding their deaths:

• Guillermo Bravo Vega, Columbia
• Marlene Garcia-Esperat, Philippines
• Manik Chandra Saha, Bangladesh
• Anna Politskovskaya, Russia
• Valery Ivanov and Alexei Sidorov, Russia
• Khalid W. Hassan, Iraq

Again, those are the names of the journalists.

Caught in the edges of their research nets: presidents (guess which ones and buy the book to see if you were right), wealthy businessmen well known to their communities.  Throughout, Terry Gould claims to have looked for the "what ticks" in the journalist who kept themselves in harm's way, but for those for whom breathing and reporting continue to twine, each chapter as well provides a guide back into the coverage that got a colleague killed.

Any volunteers for biography as a diving (in) platform?

For each of the journalists mentioned, Gould has exhumed the unique "culture of impunity" supporting the murder of journalists.  Here, taken practically at random, is a sample of how the book works:

"In Khulna Division, most of the rice stored in the Mongla godowns was in the hands of three oligarchic Muslim families--Khulna's first modern godfathers.  During the 1950s and 1960s the families had derived their power from collaboration with the Jamaat-e-Islami party that backed the Pakistani regime and had switched sides only when it became apparant that India would enter the War of Liberation on the side of a free Bangladesh.  In the two years after liberation, the families had actually expanded their power, paying off corrupt officials in the struggling new regime of Sheikh Mujib.  The head of one family had taken charge of Khulna's chamber of commerce as well as of the families' underworld operations in Mongla.  He then took full advantage of Khulna's starving citizens by demanding property mortgages as collateral for food.

"To the twenty-year-old Saha, the injustice was so overwhelming that he began to question whether the best way to serve his country was as a scientist . . . ." (p. 123)

Gould's stories, sifting over the lives of dead "journos", probe into the state level countenance and structure of murders carried out to protect the corrupt.  For bloggers and journalists drawing their quills from out of the wells of conflict and criminality--and don't those two go hand-in-hand these days?--they're instructional.

McInerney, Jay.  How It Ended.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

Back in my teen days, one writerly friend said to me, "In the old tragedies, everyone died.  In the modern ones, everyone has to go on living with the awful thing that has happened."  Place this volume of McInerney short stories in the thoroughly modern category.  Guided by a most practiced hand and told straight, they well illustrate the principle noted--and there's not a clunker in the bunch

Morris, Benny.  1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.  New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.

One of Israel's "New Historians", Benny Morris has taken punches from the pundits from Israel's right and left, so one may have confidence that the material exhumed and its presentation answer to no other than Benny Morris and the Almighty.

This is actually a thing dear to me among artists and intellectuals: freedom from other human beings and fidelity only to conscience and to God.  Western academic and institutional life have made such a possibility for quite a few, and here and there, individual affluence too may help bolster this pure modality for the mind and spirit.

While turning over the good, bad, and ugly, Morris, however, notes a paucity of data made available by Arab states: we may not have the whole of their stories, yet, but by gosh the Morris telling keeps the birthing of Israel under a highly resolved microscope.

Naipaul, V. S.  Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981; First Vintage Books Edition, 1982.

Not pretty, this travelogue, but compelling.  Among complaints in the air about militant Islam is the notion that the answer to every problem within Islam is more . . . Islam--more religiosity, more direct reflexive adherence to the instruction manual and its adjuncts.  For everyone.  Everywhere.  Naipaul attacks this from another direction, and that is observation of the vagueness with which other paths--development, contemporary education, planning--may be addressed by Islam's most zealous proponents in Iran, Pakistan, Maylasia, and Indonesia. 

Ondaatje, Michael.  Anil's Ghost.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

The evil inherent in conflict produces mystery, starting with the appearance of murder that may not look at first glance like murder.  Although the heat of conventional war has dissipated in Sri Lanka's victory over the Tamil, secrets and shadows remain stained on the landscape.  Michael Ondaatje's book works from the earlier phase of the war and with tie-ins to forensic pathology and archeology, dips into the wells of mysteries within mysteries.  Disappearances, murders, veiled threats, and the suddenly altered realities and political landscapes cast by low-intensity conflict make their appearance in this most atmospheric and engaging work.

Potok, Chaim.  My Name is Asher Lev.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. 

I think this one has aged and come from a time more innocent about art and its gifted and rebellious souls.  Unique for presenting an Hassidic art business story as well as a story about cultural cross-fertilization and reformulation, I felt it read much like a son-to-mother family drama about privacy, boundaries, and betrayal.

In today anything and everything goes art and entertainment cultures, the notion of painting a Jewish crucifixion using one's own momma, hidden by interpretation but there in spirit, may as well flit right over to the painted Jewish Madonna known as "Madonna", leaving Chaim Potok's book somewhat adolescent and sweet.

We've become accustomed to far more shocking statements.

Funny thing though: I like it that the book is here, a contribution to a growing Jewish bookshelf, and may some day serve a guest for reading on a wintry day as its depictions of mood and weather as an adversary remain memorable.

# # #