Jewfros in Palestine

” the Jewish need for a refuge from persecution; about the desire to live somewhere—anywhere, say some—where they are not a minority; about the stirring feeling of hearing Hebrew spoken in the street; about the longing to feel at home”

Unfortunately, Utah was already taken.

(Agree w/ MPA that this post is a bit over the top, but then, hey, it’s a blog.)

Additionally, even Israel becomes a single multi-ethnic state there will still be a large Jewish population there for her to feel at home among.
/Unless of course Hamas gets their wish but no one ever wants to talk about that
//Or what it would mean for the LGBTQ community either.

“People just don’t like to have it pointed out when their happiness and contentment comes at somebody else’s expense.”

That could apply to EVERYONE. You ever spend a dollar while a child somewhere is going hungry? People are allowed to write about multiple issues and don’t have to cover every issue in every piece they write.

“The Young-Girl does not want history.” …tiqqun

“There is always a penal colony hiding behind the Young-Girl’s vitrified smile.”

“Every Young-Girl constitutes, in her own way, an advanced position in the imperialism of the trivial.”

Is Jewishness really correlated with hair structure? I thought those were stereotypes.

“She herself wants to make a larger point about her struggle with identity, about the connections between her feelings about her hair and her feelings about the land, about the connections between the personal and the political”

The political? Where did you see that Corey because I didn’t.

16: Okay, how do you know she isn’t tormented by the Palestinian dispossession?

Because it wasn’t presented to you as her Spectacular surface.

You aren’t even judging her; you are judging her appearance and finding it unattractive.

Off on a slight tangent: is anyone here familiar with Kai Bird’s Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 (Scribner, 2010)? I recently ran across and bought it (in a used book place). He grew up largely in the Middle East as his father was a For. Service officer (one of the State Dept Arabists, as they were sometimes called); he married a woman whose parents were Holocaust survivors. Have only had a chance to dip into it, but appears to be an interesting, highly readable blend of memoir and history. Unlikely to change anyone’s mind about anything but probably a pretty good read. (Bird is prob. best known for his biography of the Bundys and a bio of Robert Oppenheimer, co-authored w Martin Sherwin.)

I’m going to say something trivial, sorry. When I was a kid, all I wanted was hair like Jim Morrison. Is that so much to ask? And I’d walk down the street on a sunny day and look down and see this shadow with a damn frisbee hovering over the shoulders and think, “This is not working out as I’d hoped.” Moving to Israel wouldn’t fix this problem for me. Well I warned you.

As I said in the OP, no one can disagree with the story in the abstract. It’s the reality — that her story is in fact not merely about being in a community of Jews, but being in the State of Israel — that’s the problem.

Perhaps there is some technical sense of “abstraction” and “reality” that makes sense of this otherwise paradoxical claim. As I read it, “abstract” here means the concrete subjective circumstantial experience of a particular trip and a particular life, as told in first person. “Reality” is a century or more of world history, read as a political narrative that the author ought to be in dialectic with instead of listening to the wind in her own hair.

Was being in the state of New York also a problem? In reality, I mean, not in the abstract.

Sorry if I totally bollixed that up, Bob.

Does leaving the US for Israel result in bloodier hands?

I guess the question is can a person right anything about a trip to Israel that does not mention the Palestinian issue? I say yes. If I want to write a blog post on Israeli cuisine I don’t feel like I am under any obligation to write about the Settlement issue. I feel like the same privilege should be extended to this young woman.

She wants to write about her own personal experience visiting a place that has a large Jewish majority for the first time. Why shouldn’t she write about that if she like? Because you would rather talk about something else? Well too bad. Write your own article.

Why did Johansson drop Oxfam? Because mercenary motives are more attractive.

The Young-Girl is the model post-modern citizen, and so does not think about politics.

Israel was for Shokin a consumer experience, and a positive reflection. It helped her feel sincere which is a very marketable quality.

29: Close enough, Tyrone. Commodification has become immanent. Even interiority has become commodified and superficial.

I loved the article. She is what we are.

For Sartre, ethics was both inevitable and impossible. For us, politics is both inescapable and impossible.

“MPAVictoria: “Well too bad. Write your own article.” I think I just did.”
Ha! Fair enough. I meant your own original article, not one criticizing a 24 year old talking about a personal experience that was important to her.

It goes without saying that it’s completely understandable that Jews would want to have a place free of persecution. They have been, arguably, the most persecuted people in world history.

But it doesn’t follow that in order to escape that persecution, a country, created especially for them, which guarantees their majority status, is required, or even legitimate. And given the history after its founding, it’s pretty obvious that its locale, while fulfilling part of that desire, hasn’t done a thing regarding existential threats. It’s actually increased them.

No other minority group — that I can think of, anyway — has been granted this majority state. Why this exception? It was never a good idea, much less a moral or ethical one, to remove one group of people in order to facilitate that first ever (type of) state for another. It was destined for endless violence from the getgo.

Lynne @ 3

She also mentions that her mother didn’t know what to do with her hair either–something I can certainly relate to–but not really support for her argument. While Shokin makes it clear that she was a Zionist before her semester abroad, the post does seem a bit opportunistically picking on a weak target and ruling out discussion on larger issues because those discussing them so far are not as pure as snow. Maybe Corey feels there’s something off about the hair discussion or the identity discussion themselves, and if so I’d like to hear what he has to say.

MPAV 43,

Which minority group, aside from the Jews, was ever granted their own country, thousands of miles away from their actual homes? It’s never been done, prior to the 1948 founding of a new Israel.

You aren’t describing the same thing. You’re talking about “break-away” Republics. Not the removal of one people, replaced by others formerly scattered across the globe.

“All the countries that made up the former Yugoslavia, a number of the former member Republics of the USSR and many many more. National self determination is hardly a new concept Plume.”

No, but when it is is accompanied by ethnic cleansing as it was in Yugoslavia and Israel then “national self determination” is just another one of those fancy ideological justifications for war crimes.

On the article, as Adam Smith said, a good analogy would be to someone visiting the South circa 1960 and writing about the charm and warmth and hospitality of the (white) people and never mentioning Jim Crow or civil rights. Sure you would have the right to do this, but it would seem at best a little clueless.

“I guess the question is can a person right anything about a trip to Israel that does not mention the Palestinian issue? ”

I think the OP is on target. This is a piece about belonging in Israel, not hair, and “belonging in Israel” is meaningless if there’s no Israel. Put another way, the author is saying that it’s good Israel exists,because it gave her a sense of belonging. So it’s reasonable to expect some reflection on the problems of Israel – should some people be made to suffer so others can be made to feel belonging?

Plume@48,

Not quite countries, but colonial Massachusetts (plus CT) and Pennsylvania (plus DE and kinda NJ) were more or less that for Puritans and Quakers. And at least in the former case, that formerly persecuted minority acted as a persecuting majority. Both had tensions with the preexisting inhabits (less so in PA but still pretty horrible, e.g. the Walking Purchase). The principal difference from the situation you describe in #43 was the population differential between colonized and colonizers.

mcmanus:
For us, politics is both inescapable and impossible.
I am continually amazed that people can not only get tenure but became famous by writing pages of such nonsense. (This does not directly apply to b. mcmanus, who is not famous and who is not, afaik, an academic, but who does appear to have a fondness for some of the worst stuff churned out by the academy.)

mcmanus quoting (from an earlier comment):

“The “dictatorship of beauty” is also the dictatorship of ugliness. It doesn’t mean the violent hegemony of a certain paradigm of beauty, but in a much more radical way, the hegemony of the physical simulacrum as a form of the objectivity of beings.

This is even worse. The author is upset that so much attention is paid to, and importance placed on, physical appearances and image in general (“the hegemony of the physical simulacrum”), so s/he claims that this “hegemony” is or has become a “form of the objectivity of beings.” This is a stupid, convoluted way of saying what Durkheim said much more clearly about “social facts”: namely, they can take on a constraining, ‘objective’ quality. If everyone pays attention to appearances, then the importance of appearances becomes a ‘social fact’ with which people must contend and which, to some extent, they internalize. You can say this without all this needlessly convoluted crap about “the hegemony of the physical simulacrum.”
This passage, in its deliberately obfuscatory pseudo-profundity, is a crime against the English language.

Abkhazia, a partially recognized state, like Israel, ethnically cleansed the majority of its population (mostly ethnic Georgian) to make Abkhaz the majority. That happened in 1993.

The country Corey lives in definitely gave minority rights to the previous majority population. Northern Ireland is another case that springs to mind, if we ignore Anglosphere settler colonies.

It is a very dangerous notion to view Israel as unique and sui generis.

What happened to the last sentence of the first paragraph? It should say, “(I’ve read my Sander Gilman.)”

Bianca, are you calling Paul Clean the Jewish Holacaust survivor and author of some of the most amazing German poetry ever written an anti-Semite?

jwl,
No, I’m just now discovering that Celan and Celine are not the same person.

“Bianca, are you calling Paul Clean the Jewish Holacaust survivor and author of some of the most amazing German poetry ever written an anti-Semite?”

I had the same thought, then guessed Bianca was thinking of Celine…

I highly recommend his collected works, translated by John Felstiner, who writes very well about the incredible difficulties of translation.

Corey 45,

Thanks for the quote from Arendt.

Corey,

Can you read Celan in the original? I can’t. But I think Felstiner does an admirable job of translating the nearly impossible. Poetry, any poetry, is going to be harder to translate than prose. But Celan presents unique difficulties.

“This is a piece about belonging in Israel, not hair, and “belonging in Israel” is meaningless if there’s no Israel. Put another way, the author is saying that it’s good Israel exists,because it gave her a sense of belonging. So it’s reasonable to expect some reflection on the problems of Israel – should some people be made to suffer so others can be made to feel belonging?”

I would say she is saying that for her it was a positive experience to visit a place where she wasn’t the minority. This would continue to possible even if Isreal ceases to exist as a Jewish state.

I also agree with Bianca that this is a case of Corey punching down. Not bullying but not really a cool thing to do either.

jwl 58,

Not seeing the similarity between what happened in America and 1948 Israel. World powers didn’t choose to return a scattered, very small, persecuted minority to its former homeland after a gap of two thousand years (in the case of America). In America, European powers slaughtered indigenous populations, fought over the land, with the British and Spanish “winning” the majority of that land. They outnumbered the former majority. Hordes of Europeans filled the continent, etc. etc. They didn’t single out one, otherwise helpless (and persecuted) minority to set up and replace the previous majority. They took the land for themselves.

World historical tragedies in both cases. Moral wrongs in both cases. But really not that similar. Of course, if sheer numbers is the criteria, the American tragedy dwarfs the one in Israel. But a life is a life is a life.

bob mcmanus @ 59

Very Serious People can be Very Annoying sometimes. No, they don’t like poetry. They demand that a spade be called a spade, and with spades you don’t dig graves in the air. Everybody knows that.

Here’s one from Basil Bunting:

I don’t think Corey’s fighting below his weight here. He’s not arguing with the lady, and his observations would almost surely have been the same had she been a reminiscing fortysomething rather than a less-experienced twentysomething. He’s using her article as a step-off for the point he sees it exemplifying.

Fair? Well, she did put it in print, but I’m old and tend to cut the young some slack when they write that kind of stuff.

@83 to Corey @ 76

Plume,

I can read Celan in the original, and I have no idea how you would know a translator did a good job unless you could read the original. Perhaps you may admire them for what they are in English, but how would you know what is Felstiner and what is Celan?

I don’t think your potted history of Israel 1948 is accurate, so I won’t comment on comparing it to America. I think the Abkhazia parallel is closer, so I would be interested in what you had to say about that.

Did the Nazi stereotyping really turn Israel into a place where women dont colour their hair blonde and Russian female immigrants dont dress up more than those heading from further west? Im not buying that.

Even in Sweden or Russia, most women are not blonde, not coloured blonde, much less natural. Thats nowhere the case.

if you doubt this happens, look up the staging of romantic encounters on these trips if you doubt this happens, look up the staging of romantic encounters on these trips: Heh, this happened a bit differently in my day, from what I was told: the odd stereotype about American girls.

Less young-girl, more man-child:

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/further-materials-toward-a-theory-of-the-man-child/

Well, since none of you has the guts to respond to any of my previous comments, here’s a quote from One Palestine Complete (in Google Books), pp. 257-258:

The image of the ideal pioneer was largely congruent with the image of the “new man” supposedly being created in Palestine. He appears on period posters and in photograps as a muscular, light-haired, joyous youth. The ideal was part of the Zionist movement from its beginnings. Max Nordau was famous for his call for a revival of “muscular Judaism.” Arthur Ruppin praised the pioneers as members of “a new jewish race.” Ze’ev Jabotinsky said, “There is a need to create a new Jewish frame of mind, I am almost prepared to say a new psychological race of Jews.” Ben-Gurion dreamed of a “new type of Jew who will be an exemplar for tourists.” The inspiration for this ideal came largely from the Soviet Union, but also from Weimar Germany and Fascist Italy.

jwl #86,

On Celan and the Felstiner translations. What an odd thing for you to take issue with. My embrace of those translations. Really?

First of all, a German speaker told me about his translations, recommended them, so I purchased his collected works. They are bilingual, German facing English. Even a non-speaker can sound out the German, note the pacing and make comparisons, at least.

This volume led me to also read Felstiner’s bio of Celan, which impressed me.

http://www.amazon.com/Paul-Celan-Poet-Survivor-Yale/dp/0300089228

Felstiner demonstrates in-depth knowledge of his life, the historical context, and the difficulties of translation, as mentioned. I’ve had good experience reading scholars of a particular poet who are also the translators.

And you must have missed the part where I acknowledged the difficulty of translation, especially poetry. I’ve done some myself, of Rilke’s, primarily. It’s not easy. At all. And I never said it was. Using online translation services, trying to turn that into good poetry, etc. etc. Or, simply reworking already existing English translations.

Anyway . . .

Corey: I have little to add, but I very much liked this post.

I realized a bit after reading it that it reminded me in some ways of the spoken-word opening to Bruce Cockburn’s song “Get Up Jonah”:

(I woke up thinking about Turkish drummers
It didn’t take long – I don’t know much about Turkish drummers –
But it made me think of Germany and the guy who sold me cigarettes
Who’d been in the Afghan secret police
Who made the observation
That it’s hard
To live

Then I was reminded of the proprietor of a Vietnamese restaurant in Quebec who used to be head of the secret police in Da Nang – and it occurred to me I was thinking about all this stuff to keep from thinking about something else… Isn’t that just what secret police are all about???)

Plume,

I’m glad you like Celan’s poetry. More people should read him. But you haven’t read him, except in translation. How do you know that Celan’s poetry is impossible if you can’t read it? It sounds to me like you are repeating something that other German speakers have told you.

How are you translating Rilke if you can’t read German? Are you just translating his late French work?

I am glad that there are also some alternative ways of exploring one’s Jewish heritage
http://www.yiddishkayt.org/helix-project/

SoU “ i have a hard time believing that anyone here seriously engaged in the discussion over the future of Canaan does not see parallels between the ‘here i truly feel home’ element of the linked piece, and the Zionist project writ large.”

This.
Isn’t this such a perfect example of how privilege works? But I think it’s also a good example of why people should understand privilege as more situational and less a characteristic of the sum of certain personal/social characteristics (race, class, gender…) than they seem to (at least to me). Less taxonomy, more empathy, and a little suspicion. Is her sense of not-belonging only important if it’s recognizably tied to a certified and approved type of oppression?

Here I’m trying to take bianca steele’s comment @83 and push it a bit further “That does still leave the fact that people who explore “the broader discourse” are more likely to be attacked if they’re weighing feminist-related issues more heavily than others, “

jwl,

Never said Celan’s poetry was impossible. Just that translating it was very difficult. This is acknowledged by every translator I’ve read on the subject, most of whom will say that poetry — anyone’s poetry — is tougher to translate than prose. But there are differences between poets, differences in difficulty, etc. etc. I imagine, for instance, that poets like John Ashbery, Barbara Guest and Rosemarie Waldrop (to name a few off the top of my head) are more difficult to translate into other languages than Robert Frost or William Carlos Williams.

I’m a poet, too. And have studied poetry, poets, translation, etc. etc for a long, long time. I feel pretty comfortable with my assessment of Felstiner. And, again, I look carefully at Celan’s German as it faces the English translation side of the book. I’ve done the same with Rilke, and even though I don’t speak German, as mentioned, I use translation services to extract the basic English and then try to recreate the poem in English.

It’s not the best method in the world, and it would be much, much better if I could speak the language, but it’s not impossible to come up with a poem based upon the work in question. And when it comes to poetry, that’s often the best one can do.

Huge influence for me was/is the excellent (classic, even) The Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry, edited by Paul Auster. From the 80s. First read through it roughly 30 years ago, if memory serves. Excellent intro by Auster, and then wonderful translations, by well-known poets, of the French works. The French also faces the English.

Basically totally changed the way I write poetry and think about it.

Luke,

I can see that. Probably the same for his prose. I’ve read his Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge a few times, and in two translations:

M.D. Herter Norton and a recent version by Burton Pike. I liked the recent one much more. Poulin, Kinnell, Snow and Mitchell for his poetry. I lean toward the Kinnell, there. As poetry. His is a bilingual collection, too.

Roy Belmont, “[n]ot that anyone cares, but what I keep hoping to see is someone demanding a revision of the whole thing. The whole ball of wax, from Genesis to the financial world of 2014. From conceptions of pre-history to modern intelligence testing.
Everything. Out with the old.”
As Eddy Grant sings in his for-some-weird-reason genuinely killer song “It’s All In You”, it’s all in you. It’s all in you to do the things you do. It’s all in you, baby, it’s all in you. Begin demanding such a revision of the whole ball of wax. Maybe not 100% definitely on our blog, but make demands. Don’t just wait for other people to demand things. Demand them all on your own self.

You dudes probably all already know this, but just in case not, the “Raw Materials to the Theory of the Young Girl“, published in Tiqqun in 1999, is…is…well, fuck, it’s a bunch of bullshit. You know how mcmanus-sensei has been saying things and you’ve been thinking, “that’s unusually cryptic and…sexist? Even for sensei, what’s gotten into him?” That thing did. And it was a bunch of BULLSHIT. Don’t think it was sexist or anything though, whoa Nellie no!

The Young-Girl is obviously not a gendered concept [obviously–ed]. The resplendent corporate advertising retiree who divides his time between the Côte d’Azur and his Paris office, where he still likes to keep an eye on things, is no less a Young-Girl than the urban single woman too obsessed with her consulting career to notice she’s lost fifteen years of her life to it. And how could we account, if the Young-Girl were a gendered concept, for the secret relationship between ultratrendy musclebound Marais homos and the Americanized petit-bourgeoisie happily settled in the suburbs with their plastic families?

MmmmHmmm. Suuuuurrre. The New Inquiry’s Further Materials Towards a Theory of The Man-Child were nonetheless welcome. Because the Jeune-Fille thing was a bunch of bullshit, as I mentioned. Now, was mcmanus-sensei advancing a rather refined and slanting, bishop-like judgment of CR along these lines: your critique of Zionism finds an all-too-convenient outlet when it strikes against the vulnerable beauty anxieties of a young girl? No. No, no he wasn’t, because he likes the Hardt and Negri-ism of the original. So, no worries then Corey. ODER?!11 mcmanus-sensei, enlighten us. But for real, no.

The translator’s, Alana Reines, introduction is available at comment 10

Cherilyn Parsons …reviews “Young Girl” at Truthdig

LA Reviews …”Young Girl”

http://lemonhound.com/2013/02/14/not-girls-and-madwomen-tiqquns-preliminary-materials-for-a-theory-of-a-young-girl-and-kate-zambrenos-heroines/“>Heather Cromarty …reviews “Young Girl” and semiotext(e)’s Heroines

I almost responded to LFC last night but did not want to hijack Robin’s thread. I though the earlier quotes, like “The Young-Girl does not want history” at 10 were reasonably on-topic. The point of linking to “Young-Girl” was to posit that Shokin’s “failings,” narrative, or political omissions were not individual faults, but symptomatic of late- or post-capitalism.

And the flaw of the “Man-Child” essay is that is not connected to a critique of late capitalism, that “Man-Childness” is not sufficiently embedded in neoliberalism and an ontology of globalisation, which is what tiqqun, and what is usually published by semiotext(e), Verso, and Historical Materialism try to do. Thus Jezebel was able to run with the “Man-Child” essay as about individual men and their lack of maturity, and their commenters could go with personal anecdotal complaints about men. tiqqun would never criticize an actual young girl, as opposed to the symptomatic and metaphoric “Young-Girl.” It is exactly this shifting of viewpoint from the general and the social back to the individual and particular that is neoliberalism, and subjectivity/identity as property to be managed is what tiqqun is fighting.

“the triumph of the Young-Girl originates in the failure of feminism.” …tiqqun

I no longer expect critiques of capitalism or late-capitalism or neoliberalism from Belle Waring or John Holbo.

Mark Fisher “Exiting the Vampire’s Castle

The first law of the Vampires’ Castle is: individualise and privatise everything. While in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour.

The third law of the Vampires’ Castle is: propagate as much guilt as you can.

The fourth law of the Vampires’ Castle is: essentialize. While fluidity of identity, pluarity and multiplicity are always claimed on behalf of the VC members – partly to cover up their own invariably wealthy, privileged or bourgeois-assimilationist background – the enemy is always to be essentialized.

The fifth law of the Vampires’ Castle: think like a liberal (because you are one).

mcmanus-sensei: “I no longer expect critiques of capitalism or late-capitalism or neoliberalism from Belle Waring or John Holbo.”
You may be making productive assessments of your time. Maybe. We do differ at times, though, you know. If you will admit with precision why and where they went so wrong in siting their critique of late-stage capitalism in the very bodies of some of those most vulnerable to it, while they, the white male adult tiqqun authors, sat smug behind their computer screens, I will be more than happy to assess their claims more generously. In detail mind you, and you first. LFC: my offer is quite open to you as well. If you cannot see the force of my critique I do not think you are taking any critiques of late-stage capitalism seriously. Or are you going to tell me to subsume my “mere” feminist concerns in service of the greater goods, and you all will “get to us” later?

@bob mcmanus 111

Well, your linked piece in LA Rev of Bks appears, on a glance, to be in more-or-less comprehensible English, so I suppose that’s something to be grateful for. I note that the piece refers to Hardt & Negri’s Empire as “celebrated” w/o noting that it was also severely criticized. To some extent this is all standing in for an argument about the most productive ways to criticize (critique, if you prefer) neoliberal globalization, but I don’t think that’s an argument we can have on this thread.

As for J. Holbo, he doesn’t do critiques of capitalism or late-capitalism or, except indirectly, neoliberalism, as a rule. Rather, he does critiques of U.S. conservatism. Which is fine and also has a place. But my point is don’t expect critiques of late-capitalism from a blogger whose interests lie elsewhere.

Belle @ 109

Demand things for your own self. Yes, that’s the ticket. Where else are we going to start? But of course it doesn’t end with demanding. The rest of the world, physical and social, keeps building more boxes to enclose the box we’re trying to break out of. Even worse, our own selves aren’t actually all ours, and it takes so damnably long to figure out which parts are theirs, embedded by all the customary magic in the child that we were, and then to reclaim those parts and put them to you use in our own interest. Along the way, of course, we also have to figure out where our own interest lies.

I’m with bob mcmanus on this one, at least insofar as his point is that it sometimes takes a hall of mirrors, a fragmentation and reassembly of the language we use to describe what we see, to separate the images and find out which of them genuinely belong to us. Afterwards we can go on the attack, if we like, with some confidence that we know what we’re doing. In short, I don’t see the Tiqqun piece in question as sexist at all, but as an inversion for revelatory purposes of the infantilizing sexism our society is so good at. As I say, sometimes it takes a bit of jiggery-pokery, linguistic and otherwise, to reveal the sources of these debilitating stereotypes, and more importantly, our complicity in perpetuating them.

I suppose you could argue that I can’t see the sexism because I’m male. Maybe if you do argue that, we’ll get somewhere. Similarly, LFC’s rejection of the hegemony of the physical simulacrum might be grounded in an honest yeoman’s distaste for fancy-dancers, and for long-words-where-short-words-will-do, but it could just as easily be that he has a tin ear for poetry.

Finally, I do hope Corey is patient with thread derailments, ’cause this one has sure been a doozy. Bob may have started it, but at this point it seems to be a genuinely communal effort.

@Belle Waring
LFC: my offer is quite open to you as well. If you cannot see the force of my critique I do not think you are taking any critiques of late-stage capitalism seriously. Or are you going to tell me to subsume my “mere” feminist concerns in service of the greater goods, and you all will “get to us” later?

Ok, I’m thinking this over; may have an actual reply later on.

Lynne @118–

as a point of British idiom–I don’t think it is native to North America–I believe that “punching below one’s weight” does not at all mean the same thing as “punching down.” Nearly the opposite.

“NN punches down” means that NN directs their violence against people smaller and less able than they are.

“NN punches below his weight” means that NN, despite weighing a lot, fights as though they themselves belong in a lower weight-class, i.e. they fight ineffectually. If a heavyweight “punches below his weight”, then his punches are only as effective as the punches of a much lighter, smaller boxer.

I suppose if you must “punch down,” it is only courteous to “punch below one’s weight,” but otherwise the two idioms mean totally different things.

(In fact, I have only heard the version “punches above its weight” to mean, is more effective than you might judge from the usual indices. England loves to say that its military forces “punch above their weight,” i.e. they may be small and scrappy, but by gum they are effective.)

This comment is entirely irrelevant to anything that matters.

Lynne–

Yes, punching down is bullying, or at any rate directing violence against those smaller. E.g., I weight about 18 stone, so when I repeatedly squish a million tiny yeast-fungi in my bread-dough, I am said to be “punching down” my dough.

Look, I’m not an expert on any of this–we could ask other people on the blog what they think.

Well, fwiw, I’d use it in the same way as Lynne @ 118 ie fighting below your weight means that the fight is not a fair match (in your favour) I guess *punching* below your weight could be construed as Oldster does @125, as punching above your weight means that you’ve performed better than expected, perhaps punching below your weight means you have not performed as you could.
I don’t think that’s very helpful in clarifying anything though, apologees !

I feel this article is benighted in some way. For one thing, it would come as a surprise to Tolstoy and Pushkin that the “Russo-Slavoc female prototype is “blonde, svelte, and sexy”. This does not describe Natasha Rostov, Tolstoy’s prototype of Russsian womanhood, at any rate, who is said to have black eyes and and a too-wide mouth.

Such a superficial response illustrates why I am intrigued with the Los Angeles based, Helix project, a secular Yiddish immersion project that “aims to create a fuller more inclusive picture” of Jewish culture as a world culture, whose language, poetry, and song, they maintain, is the result of an interaction and mixture of cultures.

This project has drawn the ire of some of the funders of the “Heritage” trips to Israel, who wish to forget (some would say erase) all that.

Wow, what a performance. I’m finding this discussion of Israel and Zionism enlightening.

Corey — it just gave me a weird feeling, because it would have been surprising to see someone signing in a concert in the ’70s, and I expected that to be just one more strange overlay on top of the other things you were suggesting.

Which you were right about.

MPAV #6 “People just don’t like to have it pointed out when their happiness and contentment comes at somebody else’s expense.”

That could apply to EVERYONE.

That would be the point, yes. YOU are inconvenienced, WE are oppressed, I am lost and denied.

Picking up on Plume’s question, what are the most reliable histories of early Zionism? I sorta expect most will be either glorifying or demonizing at this stage. If there is ever a just solution for the I/P conflict, I expect balanced histories, but has anyone jumped the gun and produced one already?

Lynne,

Do I really see feminism in Shokin’s piece? Yes.

I can see where you might not. You’ve said you have a strong connection to, I think, second-wave feminism and second-wave feminists, and it’s true that Shokin doesn’t connect her own experience to a larger struggle. But I believe that feminism ought to be partly about letting women like Shokin go public with their experiences and try to figure out what larger struggle they’re a part of: that might be something about which second-wave feminism would disagree with me.

Also, I’m not an activist. I’m an ordinary person who calls herself a feminist and I take what feminism I see out there, happening right now. Sometimes I agree with it and sometimes I don’t. It seems ridiculous for me to sit here and denounce this writer or that for not “really” being a feminist. But anyway what I see is that articles that call themselves feminist are making the same arguments Shokin does about Britney Spears and so on.

So I can see why you think that way about the article–and thank you for explaining–but maybe you’re expecting too much, and reading too much significance into what didn’t get into the piece.

My mother remembers that in her mixed Jewish/Protestant, white/black working/lower-middle class public grade school, in the 1950s–after the reading of the King James Bible and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, I presume–they would sing Hatikvah among other inspirational songs.

I don’t know if I understood this post correctly, but it seems that Corey Robin is of the opinion that any Jew, of any age, that feels happy and at home in Israel is doing wrong. If so: wow, what a nasty and horrible post. It would be great if someone could clarify.

My cousin, a retired physician in San Francisco, just returned from trip to Israel, his first, although he and his wife sent their also daughter on one of these dubious “Birthright” trips. He felt right at home there all right. He said that to all intents and purposes it just as though had never left California, specifically Los Angeles. He was impressed by Istanbul, though.

Tolstoy’s ideal Russian woman, Natasha, had black eyes, a wide mouth, and dark curly hair.

Samantha Shokin is a strikingly lovely young woman whose type of beauty also conforms to that of Florence or Sicily. She needs to read and travel more.

” Rashid Khalidi also has what seem to be some very good footnotes and sources to follow up in his The Iron Cage”

For some reason Khalidi’s publisher always puts the bibliography on the website and not in the book, so here it is

http://www.beacon.org/client/pdfs/0308_biblio.pdf

WTimberman –
I completely misread the intent and the content of your referenced “spade” post. Cursory haste undid me.
My apologies.
–
RE: the roots of Zionism.
I guess I understand the need for rational grounding, but doesn’t Zionism originate in Genesis?
It’s sort of like this thread, I mean the origin discussion is, where you have effete hermeneutical epistemic lightning bolts – with thunder! -flying over the heads of kids trying to stay out of the rain and get to an understanding of some basic human-interest stuff about the aesthetics of curly hair.
Zionism is a political movement etc.
But most observers would agree the support of fundamentalist American Christians is essential to the present Zionist project in a lot of important ways.
Not the least significant thing in that support is the mystical reverence accorded the Bible, wherein it is written:

…thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee. And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee.
And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee and to thy seed after thee.
And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.
And God said unto Abraham, Thou shalt keep my covenant therefore, thou, and thy seed after thee in their generations.
This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you…

and wherein it is also written:

When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Gir’gashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Per’izzites, and the Hivites, and the Jeb’usites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;
and when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them:
neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.
–
There’s the Zionist source-code.
Dismissing that stuff as ancient mumbo-jumbo and its continued presence as promise not just history, in the religious practices of people who couldn’t hold their own in a casual discussion of the post-Lacanian semantics of identity, as no more than a trivial distraction from the crucial subject at hand is I think a serious mistake.
The religious center of the Zionist project as perceived by religious Americans is vital to its survival. For that alone it needs airing out.

In my more perfect world both Bob McManus and Belle Waring would be designated national treasures.

Plume, for the very serious (as you know I am liable to be joking): if you can come away from reading that thing and think anything other than “what a bilious, misogynist, nasty little piece of work” then you are a—a different person than I, clearly! Because the hatred is venomous, it really is. And the details appended to the theoretical embodiment of the late-capitalist social breakdown are physical and specific and full of a kind of thwarted sexual desire that one just does not see elsewhere. Venomous. For true. I find it positively loathsome. This is why I never thought it neccessary to refute it properly–it doesn’t rise to the level of things that deserve to be taken seriously because it is so wretched. This is not the case of everything tiqqun ever produced! But it is the case there. mcmanus-sensei: I am perfectly aware one of the committee of writers is a women; I had thought it was more, actually–several, nu? THIS DOES NOT PRECLUDE THINGS FROM BEING SEXIST. WELCOME TO FEMINISM PRE-K.

grackle: I sort of feel flattered, but then again, I worry about my company. Nah, fuck it. Me and mcmanus-sensei. I want a life-size statue. In bronze.

Make that read for the first time.

The accusation of “misogyny” is a big deal.

Nope. Please don’t address me in future, Plume. I don’t want to speak with you.

Don’t address me. Thanks.

I’m not your enemy, either. I’m a feminist, too, and your ally. I just happen to include class in the mix. I just happen to see that as far more important than texts from obscure French groups who no longer exist.

Compare that with Republican governors and state legislatures across the country trying to destroy a woman’s right to choose. Compare that to women making 77 cents on the dollar and the absence of the ERA, which I strongly support.

A text by an obscure, defunct group of French intellectuals, who patterned themselves after Dada and the Situationists?

Come on. Perspective and proportion.

Wrestling with white- and goyim-centric standards of female beauty has nothing to do with Shokin being a woman and (yep!) a feminist? Hokay, then.

Beyond that, of course, and in this here thread, we have a lot of men complaining, in overwrought terms, about just how ill-equipped feminism is in saving the world and curing cancer and creating world peace. Or did the Tiqqun discussion just pass you by altogether? Maybe reading the whole thread is in order? Just a thought.

I only came in about tiqqun to help others understand what mcmanus was on about, because I am intellectually charitable. I think if one re-reads the thread, Plume, what one actually notes is that mcmanus-sensei, ever in the vanguard, trolled you out onto a limb, you kept trolling from there despite total ignorance of the terrain, and then he skipped town as soon as any actual quotes were in the offing, leaving you to die as troll cannon-fodder. Food for thought there: don’t be trolled by the master, unless you are prepared to die on the bridge.

Agreed, but any discussion of the commentary of bob mcmanus which does not accept as its very premise that he is trolling is a discussion which is simply under-informed. If you doubt this at all, please read threads faithfully and email me in ten days. I will be VERY surprised indeed if you do not think he is trolling both the universe in general and, in all likelihood, you in particular, at that point.

For there is no unitary “point of view” which mcmanus-sensei might, with separate applications of vehemence, wish to put across, while meeting with continuous resistance from me. It is not the case that he could fairly be described as “always to my left” politically, for example. On account of mcmanus-sensei has raised trolling to a higher art form what we mortals wot not of (though one can make him angry without an astonishing amount of effort, and my husband has genuinely trolled him on several occasions). Look, during the Fukushima reactor meltdown after the tsunami he advocated, in all seriousness, that the US nuke the reactor. Yes. Totally seriously. I know what you’re thinking. “Ha! Who was being trolled then hahaHA!” Look, please, just take this one little thing from me on faith. I don’t feel like linking the comments, (which were at another site but were still him) but if you will chapter and verse read CT threads with a willingness to be convinced either way, and in ten–fuck, in a week (and I say this only because he might go somewhere)–want to tell me mcmanus-san over here is not trolling…dag. You are very willing to be trolled.

In the case at hand, do you think the tiqqun piece is not misogynist? If you do, would you not agree it was misleading, in a way, for mcmanus-sensei to lure Plume out there and then skedaddle as soon as anyone who had read the work in question appeared in the thread? (Plume shouldn’t have rushed after sensei, as I said, because it’s a mug’s game, but he had the decency to say he didn’t know enough about it and then re-consider, even if the attempted ‘let’s re-cast my being lured onto that trembling branch by sensei as a metaphor for how left politics has been forced into internecine strife’ thing was maybe a little weak.) If you don’t think it is, would please tell me why, even in a two-sentence version? Because I really don’t see it–at all. But I am not unwilling to listen to argument by any means. If you have no opinion, than on what basis have you formed the opinion as to whether sensei was trolling or not? No basis whatsoever? That doesn’t seem like a good basis, I must say.

Mmmm, I see your point. Plume was inclined to believe the things he took mcmanus to be claiming, and so was inclined to defend mcmanus’ sources without 100% knowledge of them, something I would never do am pretty sure I did earlier today on Gawker. In that sense he was lured out onto a trembling branch by the master, who, as I said, bounced when knowledge was in the offing. But the fact that sensei did so does not strike me as evidence of sincere concern for the truth…rather the opposite. Tactical withdrawal, and, again, that often leaves raw recruits behind to die.

But seriously, mcmanus-sensei is something way a billion times more than deliberately opaque: he is a fucking Ada Lovelace confusion-engine! Me, personally, I like him! Otherwise why would I call him and Emerson sensei and no one else, hm? But he’s a troll. No shame there. I troll my own blog after all. Not to the degree mcmanus would if he had a blog…suddenly I felt as if a million LULZ were crying out at once…because who would READ the blog? No one. No one would. Someone’s got to be the straight man. That I should ever be cast in this role–or for the love of God John Holbo–is merely a trillion pounds of evidence on my side of the scale.

Wm Timberman @121
could just as easily be that he [LFC] has a tin ear for poetry

I didn’t intend to comment further here but this calls for a response. I have an old-fashioned, I guess, view that poetry is a distinct genre, mode, form, thing, etc., best judged by standards appropriate to it. One doesn’t expect poetry necessarily to convey clear meanings, and any meanings it does convey are often conveyed very indirectly. Poetry of course is a broad category and I recognize that it comes in a large variety of different shapes, including prose poems. But while poetry is a broad label, it’s not an all-inclusive one that *usually* shd be applied to prose, even prose that displays, in yr words, linguistic “jiggery-pokery.”

I don’t think the quoted passage to which I objected is poetry, nor do I think that (except with very rare exceptions) any social theory, political theory, history, etc. is poetry. Now, such work can and sometimes does have literary merit of course, and it can even be argued that in some cases the literary style of such work is inextricably connected to its substance. But that doesn’t make it poetry.

If you want to maintain — and I’m not talking spec. about the Young-Girl piece here, which I haven’t read and don’t intend to any time soon, if ever — that any effort to engage in “fragmentation and reassembly of the language we use to describe what we see” is poetry, that’s your prerogative of course. I don’t share that view, and indeed find it extremely uncongenial. If you think that a producer of theory (or Theory) can be excused from any obligation to convey meaning with some minimal degree of directness as long as he or she is engaged in the “fragmentation and reassembly” of language, fine. That’s not my opinion.

Your own comments here often strike me as well written but somewhat ornate, roundabout, occasionally opaque, and difficult to decipher in terms of a point, so perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised that that is your view.

Belle Waring,

Thanks. That was a gracious and deserved take down.

Funny thing is, this mess started, at least for me, because I thought others had needlessly jumped the gun to judge things all too harshly, etc. To be judgmental before the facts were in. This, I did, without reading the source in question or keeping up with the running conversation.

I didn’t even think I was guilty of same, at the time. Upon reflection . . . . it’s rather obvious. Doesn’t work so well in a conversation online or anywhere else. “Look before ya leap!” (I should have remembered), and all the good stuff one’s Scottish grandmother told us to do.

She also used to say, putting on her best Scottish brogue, “Fight ye devils, fight!! I hate peace!!” when we children were going at it for no reason.

Mea culpa.

Spanish food involves the pig to exclude Jews and Muslims, yet we don’t complain about the racism of the burrito.

What you mean “we,” white man?

It’s the lard in plain white bread, though, that makes Spain and Poland so logistically challenging (and so charged with Zionist subtext!) for Jewish youth tours.

The figures I have seen are that 80 percent of the world’s Jews are Ashkenazi. The Helix tours are not confined to the shetl and are predominantly, though not exclusively secular. They have plans for tours of places where Shephardic Jews lived also. The tour organizers contend, or at least Robert Adler Peckerar does, that Jewish identity has long been predominantly cultural and secular, just as the Zionists do. They wish to raise public awareness of the centuries of Jewish culture which has been lost sight of if not erased in the post-holocaust world. According to the Los Angeles Times:

Adler Peckerar’s group is part of a postmodern movement that celebrates the flowering of a largely secular Yiddish culture, one that produced an astonishing outpouring of literature, music, art and science in the late 19th and early 20th centuries before being all but silenced by the one-two punch of Soviet repression and the Holocaust.

What Yiddishkayt doesn’t tend to celebrate is the Jewish religion, and many of its leading figures are atheists. They embrace a notion of Jewishness that is purely cultural.

“There are people who aren’t interested in the synagogue route, and they don’t connect to Judaism through religion, or they don’t connect to Judaism through Israel,” said Aaron Paley, who founded Yiddishkayt in 1995 and whose family is providing the seed money for the Helix program. “This is a different way to connect with who you are.”

Adler Peckerar, a former professor of Jewish literature and culture at the University of Colorado, goes further, arguing that the Jewish religion has never been central to Jewish identity.

Lard is in the well-made tortilla too. Noticeably, both in its presence and absence.
But only in Spain because of cross-fertilizing with US franchise fast food reality.
It’s a Mexican issue, the burrito. Originally. Unlike tapas and sangria.
And well who knows really not a McManian de-fense but I think maybe some folks have are confusing “trolling” acting in a trollish manner and bridges central to the mise en scene, with “trolling” dragging baited hooks behind your boat in hopes of enticing fishes onto the hooks and into the boat.
Trolls hide under the bridge, and wait for unalert passers to jump out in front of on, and demand moneys for further passage – troll bridge stop pay troll – or bad things will ensue, because trolls are well-centered for physical altercation and mean-spirited generally speaking, plus not exactly human so no loyalty.
Fisherfolk trolling for piscene sustenants are not grossly misshapen and demanding money from innocent travelers.
They are dressed funny because of weather and conditions, and work-hardened faces plus elements. You only have to give them money if you want fish.
Confusion complicated by the fact that the internet commentarian ecology is teeming with both kinds of metaphorial pain in the ass. With a dual continua of blurry almosts. So lots of blurring making the def indistinct.
Consequent misuse.
Plus regular folks whose articulate sane and clarity-soaked comments are somewhat opaque now and again to the lesser-gifted mind.
Even sometimes to those Langley-affinites whose everyone a handful I ever met, a fulsome handful indeed, were totally cool-radar proficient, and knew how to talk good, and whose cousins in the preterite world can still walk through all beats w/o falter.
Opacity there being the motific more than say the constructual.

Burritos are in Spain because of California.

Biblical scholarship says that the events recounted in Exodus never happened.
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/144177/reconciling-biblical-criticism/2

[David ] Wolpe is ranked as America’s most popular rabbi by Newsweek, but when he told his Conservative congregation that modern scholarship cast doubt on the historicity of the Exodus from Egypt, it proved to be one of his most unpopular sermons. Though many congregants supported their rabbi, others were disturbed by his words. Dr. Laura Schlessinger condemned the sermon on her nationally syndicated radio show, and Wolpe’s Sinai Temple had to set up an extra phone line to deal with the response. As one columnist put it at the time, the incident revealed that “the Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Reform movements must do a better job of explaining themselves, even to some of their members.”

You are aware of it, but Rabbi Wolpe’s congregation wasn’t.

Creation stories can be very toxic, although the Nibelungenlied isn’t a very good example, since it was never widely popular. Better examples are the epic poems of the Albanians in keeping old hatreds going for many centuries. Anyway, someone upthread said that Zionism is rooted in the Bible — therefore, it is rooted in myth. It’s one thing to learn about myths and enjoy them in artistic works, it’s another to act as though they justify political actions.

Well, it also conquered the Roman empire, too. It’s a pretty powerful book. But it wasn’t merely the Bible that caused the foundation of the state of Israel, The events ofWW2 and allied guilt played a part.

LFC @195
This “pointless show-off” is not going to bother to expect your reply, so we should both do nicely there.
I will say there has been very little in my life to exceed the bizarrely empty timid dullness of academic conformity in its incitement of my lusis animus, plausibly because it so faithfully accompanied and so often justified the grinding torments of my youth.
One can see yes? That that being lumped into a boxcar of rejectees for being “bizarre” against those same conformist standards, well it’s damn near a compliment, really.

Harold – thanks for the Helix link; I think Yiddishkayt represents a really important alternative narrative. When I was studying the Holocaust I more than once caught myself thinking “These Bundists seem to have the right ideas – we never hear of them any more, though, I wonder what happened?” Then I remembered what happened.

well then – this thread certainly derailed – and then crashed under a bridge or something, what with that whole argument over who gets to claim the title of king/queen troll. i guess that’s what happens when people start to talk about the occupation and feminism all at once.

@2o3 “discussions of Israel are usually not that crazy…” i feel that the discourse here in the US is starting to shift, and the fever is breaking. so your ‘are usually’ here, as i see it, is increasingly going to be a ‘used to be’