By way of Engage, I came across this excellent interview with Moishe Postone which I commend it to your attention. I have a quibble though and it’s about the very first thing he says:
It is true that the Israeli government uses the charge of anti-semitism to shield it from criticisms.
Continue reading ‘Moishe Postone, Antisemitism And Star Trek’
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The Tehran Symphony Orchestra has been wending its way around Europe performing a piece nauseatingly entitled “Peace and Friendship Symphony,” by Majid Entezami, and described - in a brilliant piece by Michael Kimmelman - as “a four-movement jeremiad of martial bombast and almost unfathomable incompetence and silliness.” As Kimmelman points out, protests did greet the orchestra in certain cities, but I’m not aware of Naomi Klein, Brian Eno, John Pilger or any other minor radical celebrity urging a boycott.
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Yesterday I reviewed Bridget Kevane’s ignorant and ill-intentioned attempt to besmirch the memory Jacobo of Timerman. Today I’m going to take a look at her hatchet job on Argentina in general and its current ambassador it Washington in particular, a text in which she gets in a few final swipes at Timmerman along the way.
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Many readers will be familiar with the name of the Argentine journalist and publisher Jacobo Timerman. Kidnapped and tortured by agents of the 1976-1983 dictatorship, he was eventually allowed to leave for Israel where he wrote a book, Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number that was to become a classic account of the horrors of military rule in Argentina.
The British writer Will Self has an essay here about his late German colleague W. G. Sebald’s writing about the Holocaust. In it he objects to the existence of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK and rejects the idea of the Holocaust being remembered at all. He writes,
Continue reading ‘British Writer Rejects Holocaust Commemoration’
There’s a long article here about the British historian Tony Judt and from it I’d like to focus on the following paragraph:
Judt was born into a lower-middle-class Jewish family of Marxist anti-Communists. They lived in London’s East End, a historically Jewish section of the city. “Anti-Semitism at a low, polite, cultural level was still perfectly acceptable,” Judt recalls. Fearing that their teenage son was too socially withdrawn, his parents, in 1963, sent him to a summer camp on a kibbutz in Israel. Judt became a committed Zionist. “I was the ideal convert,” he says. A leader in left-wing Zionist youth movements, he even delivered a keynote address at a large Zionist conference in Paris when he was only 16 years old. [… ]In 1967, a few weeks after the Six-Day War, Judt volunteered as a translator for the Israel Defense Forces on the Golan Heights. He was surprised to find that many of the young Israeli officers he worked with were “right-wing thugs with anti-Arab views”; others, he says, “were just dumb idiots with guns.” Israel, he came to believe, “had turned from a sort of narrow-minded pioneer society into a rather smug, superior, conquering society.”
Continue reading ‘Tony Judt: Anti-Zionist as Disillusioned Convert’
I’m not a resident of the United States and I have a couple of question for Z Word readers who do live there: are intelligent people in the US who take an interest in such matters generally unaware that there have always been Jews that opposed Jewish nationhood and, in particular, that some 20th century Jewish intellectuals like Hannah Arendt (when she wasn’t busy making excuses for Martin Heidegger) were scathingly critical of Israel? Has this information been excluded from public debate? Does mentioning these facts here make me courageous? By mentioning them now do I risk the wrath of AIPAC?
Continue reading ‘Judith Butler and Anti-Zionist Charlatanry’
Osvaldo Bayer is concerned that the Jews don’t appeared to have learned anything from their history.
But there are also those people who have tragic experience of persecutions, such as the Jews, who have laws that lead to humans being humiliated. It’s well known that the State of Israel doesn’t recognize marriages between Jews and non-Jews. [… ] It has thus become fashionable for Jews who want to marry a non-Jew to go to Cyprus to do it. Quite an industry has built up on the island to allow non-Jews and Jews to get married. According to Jewish law only those born of Jewish mothers are regarded as Jewish.
I’ve written about Argentine poet and anti-Israel whack job Juan Gelman for this blog here. Readers may be interested in this piece I wrote elsewhere about his latest kowtow to a tyranny.
Ezequiel Adamovsky, Maristella Svampa and Horacio Tarcus are three prominent Argentine intellectuals and they have a joint op-ed piece about the investigation into the AMIA massacre in today’s Pagina/12. They call into question the version of the attack put forward by State Attorney Albert Nisman and criticize the failure to effectively prosecute Argentines involved in the attack. Official Jewish organizations are also attacked for what the authors see as their unconditional support for the government’s approach to the investigation.
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, holder of the Nobel Peace Prize, Federico Shuster, Dean of the Social Sciences Faculty of the University of Buenos Aires and Osvaldo Bayer, a writer regarded as something of a guru on human rights, are just three of the pillars of Argentine progressive and left option who have signed a petition calling for the release of detainees being held in connect with an attack on Jews and others celebrating the 61st anniversary of Israel’s independence in Buenos Aires on May 17th.
Continue reading ‘Argentine Left Calls for Open Season on Misbehaving Jews’
There’s a retrospective of Avi Mograbi’s films on at a leading Buenos Aires art house and Z32, his most recent effort, has a regular slot at a state-sponsored cinema that normally only puts on Argentine films that wouldn’t survive on the commercial circuit.
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Are you Jewish? You are? Ok, pay attention because David Hare thinks that something terrible may be about to happen to you,
“If we do not find the path to honest cooperation and honest negotiations with the Arabs, then we have learned nothing from over 2,000 years of suffering and we deserve the fate that will befall us” is what Albert Einstein said.
Ken Loach, whose oeuvre as a film director includes the masterful Kes and the cringe-making Land and Freedom, believes that antisemitism is “understandable.”
Continue reading ‘Marxist Film Director Says Antisemitism is “Understandable”’
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