Imagine that you are a distinguished academic, a sociologist say, or a historian. You have a nice job in an American university, your family background is Catholic Polish and though you are well known to experts in your own area of study the broader public has never heard of you.
Archive for the 'intelligentsia' Category
Many readers will have already come across Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece in The Atlantic about the possibility of Israel resorting to force against Iran. Though it’s received a lot of attention, I don’t think it’s that interesting; it’s long on personal anecdote (by the way, for a seriously unflattering view of the Netanyahu family you ought to read Chapter 12 of this book) and the views of unnamed sources and short on analysis. People seriously interested in this matter still need to read Tira.
Mondoweiss has reported the death of Tony Judt. I daresay they’d know. As good a moment as any to recall that he regarded Jews as morally unfit for self-government and warned that the Jews as a whole might have to suffer as a result of the alleged crimes of some individual Jews.
The death of the Portuguese writer José Saramago has just been announced. As he won the Nobel Prize in 1998 and had in recent years acquired a status something like that of a secular seer we are in for a couple of days in which the media will carry eulogies praising his humanity and intelligence.
Apart from being Jewish and having lost family members in the Holocaust (why that should bestow insight on anyone’s analysis of Middle East history and politics I don’t know but it seems to be the case), Tony Judt’s chief claim to credibility as a critic of Israel is that he is a renowned historian of modern Europe and is therefore, one would imagine, capable of getting his facts right and arguing in a rigorous and convincing manner.
Fintan O’Toole is a prominent Irish writer, journalist and theater critic. If you’re Irish and have a comfortable station in life but consider yourself progressive in your politics you probably have a very positive view of O’Toole and have incorporated a good deal of his worldview into your own.
Continue reading ‘Israel = Nazi Germany Says Top Irish Writer’
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Linda Grant has a piece here in which she compares the Gaza flotilla with the Exodus. If I understand it correctly, its main point is that legality or justifiability of the conduct of Britain and Israel in each case is largely irrelevant, what really matters is the broader public perception of what occurred and the images on which that perception is based.
The Israeli writer David Grossman is a great artist but that condition offers no guarantees about his views on current events. At the end of an article in which he harshly criticizes Israel’s policy towards Gaza and the diversion of the Gaza flotilla he says,
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’
