After the Snow

I suppose I should start a photo-blog at Tumblr. But that would be yet another demand on my time. So here are a few pictures from the day after the big snowstorm of January 10th 2013; being Jerusalem and not, say, Chicago, the snow mostly melts within a day or two.

Jacques Barzun, Intellectual Giant, 1907-2012

When Jacques Barzun was born, there was a Habsburg on the throne, and a Hohenzollern, and a Romanov. (And a Windsor). He first began teaching during World War One (then known as The Geat War). He started teaching at Columbia University before the Geat Recession. In 1956 he was pictured on the cover of Time Magazine as the representative of America's finest intellectuals. In those days, Time Magazine's cover interested many people. By the time of the student riots of 1968 he was an important university administrator approaching retirement; his rioting students are now retiring. He died yesterday, apparently lucid and creative until the end.

He was of the class of public figures for whom newpapers prepare obituaries in advance - the New York Times one is unusually long and detailed, to fit his unusually long and creative life.

He wrote shelves of books. I've read only one of them, some years back, but it remains in my mind as an unusually important book - and also, a bit startling for an author who was in his 90s at the time - an innovative book: From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present, published in 2000. Here's how it begins:

It takes only a look at the numbers to see that the 20th century is coming to an end. A wider and deeper scrutiny is needed to see that in the West the culture of the last 500 years is ending at the same time. Beliving this to be true, I have thought it the right moment to review in sequence the great achievements and the sorry failures of our half millenium.

A few pages later he present the outlines of the half millenium:

[I]t could be said that the first period - 1500-1660 - was dominated by the issue of what to believe in religion; the second - 1661-1798 - by what to do about the status of the individual and the model of government; the third - 1790-1920 - by what means to achieve social and econmic equality. The rest is the mixed consequence of all these efforts.

Read it. It's a very fine book, and it tells important things about our world.

Over at the other place

If you're visiting this blog, you're at the wrong place. This one is mostly dormant, while over here is the one which is sort of active. There's also one here, but I admit that for the moment it's hardly more than a place-holder, sadly.

The blogs of the Israel State Archives

M colleagues and I at the Israel State Archives (ISA) have launched two new blogs, one in English and the other in Hebrew. Once we get into stride we may also start an Arab-language one. The purpose of the blogs is to present interesting documents, many of which will be declassified as we post them.

Any requests for specific documents, or for documents on particular topics? Drop us a note.

Vindication for (mostly) desisting from blogging

As I wrote last summer, I stopped blogging when I was appointed Israel's State Archivist. Being a high civil servant is not compatible with running a political blog, and I had decided the potential value of confronting the challenges of documenting the activities of Israel's government was the more important of the two.

Eight months into the new job, this decision is being vindicated. Two weeks ago the government decided to adopt our proposal for a basic reform in the way the administration manages its digital documentation, which is to say, all its documentation. In essence, this will mean re-inventing the State Archives, with significant implications further afield.

When I came to the job I found that for various reasons, the Finance Ministry had taken upon itself to set up a large and very professional storage center for paper documentation, near the northern Negev town of Arad. Alas, the project was going to cost more than the original plan had foreseen. This give me an opening, in which my staff and I indicated that there were parts of the project which could be reduced (and thus made cheaper) if in return funds would be freed to deal with digital aspects which had not been addressed; dealing with the digital aspects would allow us to make the trade offs in the Negev storage installation. It may come as a surprise, but apparently when one makes sensible suggestions within the government, reasonable people will listen and perhaps be convinced.

The proposal adopted by the government calls for a number of major changes.
1. We're going to join other government agencies in creating document-management systems in the government agencies so that their documentation will be tagged before creation according to the span of time until it can be deleted - or sent to the archives for permanent storage.
2. We're going to scan very large quantities of existing paper documentation, so as to make it digitally accessible.
3. We're going to figure out how to salvage what can be salvaged from the servers of the government agencies;
4. We're going to have to figure out how to fundamentally accelerate the de-classification of the country's documentation, most of which is still classified;
5. And we're expected to develop a range of tools to make the documentation easily accessible and useful to anyone with an interest in the story of the State of Israel, not just professional researchers.

And we're going to build that storage installation in Arad and move the paper documentation down there. And a few other things, along the way: once we're busy, why not add another few tasks?

So now I'm going offline again, and the blogging will mostly stop, with a rare exception here or there. I remind you that in the upper left corner I"ve made three pages with collections of stuff I recommend reading, about Jerusalem, war and peace in the Mideast, and Jewish life and life in Israel.

Nature is Stronger

Nature is stronger than Man, as these photos demonstrate.

Lectures in Germany

For whatever reason there seem to be many German readers of this blog. If any of them are interested in introducing themselves, starting Thursday I'll  be lecturing in Berlin, Erfurt, Bremen, Hamburg, Weiden (yup) and Freiburg. In Berlin it's the Mideast Freedom Forum Berlin, in most other places the local DIG will have the details.

Blogging may well be slow over the next week or so.

Early Summer Reading List

Here are some books I've heard good things about, in no particular order.

Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has written a memoir. Apparently he really doesn't like the other co-founder, watzizname, but other than that it's a fine book. Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft.

Michael Korda has written a very good biography of Lawrence of Arabia, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia. Given that the things Lawrence dealt with are very much still with us, it's probably worth the time.

Having mentioned those two books, it occurs to me that a while ago a reader asked what sort of books are on my wish list. Well, it's a long list, it continually gets longer, and life is not going to be long enough for all of it, so there's no actual danger that by sharing it will disappear, is there. So here are a handful of the specimens:

Norman Geras, Crimes against Humanity: Birth of a Concept

Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, by Charles King

The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Michael Cook

A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (Columbia/Hurst) by John Calvert

The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain by Benzion Netanyahu (Bibi's dad)

As Meat Loves Salt (Harvest Original) by Maria McCann

I dare anyone to come up with a common thread, except for the fact that they're all available on Amazon.

The Never Noticed War

For all that I've tried once or twice, I've never quite managed to figure out what the 1st World War was all about. Something about balance of powers, or retraining German militarism, or something. Yet this vagueness is as nothing when compared to what was probably the third worst war in the 20th century, and by far the worst since the 2nd World War: the war in Congo. Perhaps five million people perished, the killing never really ended, and yet the international community, the UN, the world's media, and everyone else, basically didn't notice; in the rare cases when they did, no-one ever tried seriously to explain what was going on.

Now there's a book which tries to explain, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, by Jason Stearns. The Economist reviews it approvingly here. I don't know if everyone interested in world politics needs to read it, but I can't think why not.

Incoming Train

I'm offline most of the time these days, hence no blogging. Still, things can happen even in the real world out there. The other day, for example, I heard a short presentation from a fellow who's involved in the very large project of building a new train line up to Jerusalem. Much of it will be underground; occasionally it will cross high above valleys; travel time from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, once it's completed, will be about half an hour, and the final station will be deep underneath Jerusalem.The whole thing will be quite dramatic.

The fellow started his presentation by showing a black and white postcard. (Note to readers born after 1980: Postcards were smallish pieces of cardboard with a picture on one side and a couple of square inches on the other side on which folks used to write a short message and then send through the mail. Real mail. Oh, forget it). The message said that the sender had just arrived in Paris, and was planning to take the train to Frankfurt, which he would reach at 10:37am.

"The writer was my grandfather, it was 1959, and although he's no longer alive, I have no doubt he indeed reached Frankfurt at 10:37 the next morning. Half a century later, here I am beavering away on this project, and I have no idea what year it will be when the train finally reaches Jerusalem".

Nails from the Cross

Don't get cross with me, but this story seems to me less than iron-clad.

Slow Blogging

Blogging is likely to be a bit slow here for the next few days. Too many other things going on. You can always read Haaretz to keep your spirits up.

The Frightening Power of Nature

By now we've all seen the footage of the incoming Tsunami rolling across fields and destroying everything in its wake. This film, however, is by someone standing above the wave, watching as it sweeps away the surrounding town. Part of what makes it so frightening is that the destruction rises - it doesn't happen all at once, and landmarks you see high and dry in the first minutes, are gone by its end.

Daf Yomi in South Korea

I don't know what to make of this story, except to say that the world is a curious place.

Democracy in Action

If anyone can explain this procedure, please feel free to explain in the comments section.

Triangle Shirtwaist Catastrophe

100 years ago today 146 people, mostly women, mostly new immigrants, many of them Jews, perished in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York. The world has changed dramatically since then, and the horrible deaths contributed their bit to some of the beneficial changes.

The article behind the link ends with allusions to present-day political disagreements, while admitting the comparisons aren't very useful. Non-unionized immigrant women cooped up in a fire trap by rapacious factory owners a century ago don't tell us much about well-payed teachers employed by the public today. Yet this shouldn't hide the fact that a century ago the unions were on the right side of the story, and many important parts of the story still remained to be told, and people suffered - and sometimes died - because they hadn't yet been told.

Israeli Field Hospital in Japan

According to the Jerusalem Post, Israel is the first country to be setting up a field hospital in Japan.

“I don’t know how or why it is that our field hospital is the first,” the [Israeli] ambassador said. “Maybe we moved faster. Maybe it’s because of our experience.”

The Real Heroes of March

The few hundred Japanese engineers and technicians trying to head off nuclear catastrophe at Fukishima. Undoubtedly the world's top heroes this March.

New Website With Blogs

I'm seriously looking into changing the format of this blog into something richer and more useful. The idea will be to have different sections that do different things, one of which might or might not be a blog. So I started looking into Wordpress (Blogger isn't relevant). So far as I can see, however, doing this the right way will require more technical skill than I've got. So if there's anyone out there who lives in my vicinity, and has experience in setting up a website using Wordpress, and wishes to announce themselves to me, it's yaacov dot lozowick at yahoo dot com. Until I change that, too.

Pro-Israel Blog-Off

This blog is being voted on this week at Israellycool's site. The point is to have lots of people introduced to useful blogs they hadn't previously known about, so go, click on the various links, and vote as you will. Do the same next week, and thereafter.