Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

Here's a quick non-review of Vasily Grossman's magnificent Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics). Non-review, since I don't read enough literature to be able to write a literary review, but I do wish to bring this book to the attention of potential readers.

Grossman (1905-1964) was a Soviet writer and an important war correspondent during the 2nd World War.  He was at Stalingrad, and at the liberation of Nazi camps. His mother was murdered by the Nazis; he himself was later castigated for not being patriotic enough. All of these themes are woven into Life and Fate, a story of the Soviet Union during the battle of Stalingrad which is clearly modeled on War and Peace. Like War and Peace, its multi-stranded story presents the entire society - generals and prisoners, intellectuals and combat pilots, old women and young men, heroes and knaves.

Last year I reviewed Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, and in doing so I mentioned a series of previous books I had read comparing the Soviets and the Nazis. I recommended Snyder's book and still do, but Grossman's is much better. Snyder's has far more historical facts; Grossman's gives the historical truth. He was there, watching and understanding, and he tells it as it was. The oddest part of his book is that he ever thought it could be published in the Soviet Union, even in the relatively benign Khruschev years. Such a damning portrait of Soviet society could only be published outside the system, as it eventually was in 1980, 16 years after the author's death and after the manuscript had been smuggled out of the country.

In an otherwise powerful book, a number of sections stood out in particular in my reading. The first is a farewell letter of a doomed Jewish mother, on the eve of the liquidation of her ghetto. I have to assume Grossman was writing about his own mother. There's a description of how scientific discoveries are made which could have been lifted directly out of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition were it not for the fact that Grossman wrote before Kuhn, and had no way of being influenced by him. There are descriptions of the battle of Stalingrad, and especially the fighters of a surrounded and doomed Soviet outpost which contradict the entire sense of Soviet society for their raw sense of freedom. There is a description of a Nazi death installation which isn't accurate, but the power of Grossman's words about how "life is tuned into inanimate material" makes it more potent than most of what has been written about Nazism. There are descriptions of how individuals coped with life under totalitarianism, how they adapted, and how by doing so they bolstered the regime.

About a hundred pages before the end there's a description of the interrogation of Krymov, a life-long communist who is now in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. This section was one of the most important I've read, ever. It shows how the interrogator takes decades of loyal activity for the Party, and convincingly makes it sound like decades of subterfuge and treason. Krymov knows it's all a lie, but as the interrogation continues, he sees the sense of the allegations, how useless it will be to cling to his version, and how hopeless it will be to continue to believe in his life-long convictions and his own memory at the same time. His cell-mates, all veterans of the party and interrogations, demonstrate that in order not to reject everything he has ever believed in, he must accept that he has been wrong all along - or vice versa. Either way, the Party will remain untouched, while he, the life-long party activist, will be destroyed.

Much of the book is fascinating for a history buff such as I. The section about how the interrogator has collected all possible information about Krymov's entire life, so as to arrange it in the most damning version conceivable, however, is of urgent importance not only for the dwindling number of us who still remember the history of the 20th century. This is how the purveyors of systematic lies operate today, in 2013, and will still be operating in 2113.  Read Mondoweiss any day of the week, or preferably, every day for a few weeks, and you'll see the NKVD in its full glory.

Are America's Jews still Jewish?

OK, I admit, that title was a wee bit provocative. Not nice of me.

On the other hand, given the story of my family, which isn't new, and the PEW survey of American Jews, which was published earlier this month, along with a slowly-broadening fissure opening between the world's largest Jewish community and the second largest, I think it needs to be asked.

My family's story isn't important, were it not for the fact that I've been watching it happen all my life, and I've always assumed that it was typical. My great-grandparents moved to the Goldene Medina in the first years of the 20th century, as is true about most of America's Jews. I no longer have contact with quite a number of my cousins, especially the 2nd and 3rd ones, but so far as a I know, a clear majority of them are no longer Jews. Some are quite open about this (the Pew survey found more than a million descendants of Jews who define themselves as not Jewish); others are too lazy about the issue to make any declarations.

The Pew survey has been dissected, discussed, and dismissed with much fanfare since its publication; it has also caused much dismay. It's also more than 200 pages long, so many of the people who've been discussing it avidly may not have read it all. (I skipped the almost 100 pages that focused on methodology). You don't need me to analyze what's in it; indeed, all I'm going to offer is a very small nutshell. In one brief sentence: America's Jews are disappearing, but until they do, they mostly feel good about being Jews.

Not all of them, and not equally, of course. The 10% who are Haredi, and the 5% who are Modern Orthodox, are mostly flourishing. This wasn't always so, of course, and traditional Jews who moved to America usually lost some or all of their commitment to a halachic lifestyle, but those who held onto it now live in a strong community with little attrition.

All the rest, however, are losing numbers and losing commitment. Households with two committed Jews are losing less than households who aren't like that - but a large and growing number aren't like that. Back in the early 1970s there was a spate of articles in Israeli newspapers, I remember, about how intermarriage in America was going to result in the disappearance of America's Jews. This then didn't transpire, and the Israeli smugness abated - except that it has happened, and is happening, and while it's taking longer than the Israelis expected, it looks inexorable.

Yet the survey also shows that large numbers, and clear majorities, of America's Jews are proud to be Jews. How then to resolve those two characteristics?

The answer, I fear, is in that well-worn issue of what being Jewish means. Is what America's Jews are proud of, really Judaism?

Jewish identity was not complicated since before the Common Era all the way up until the beginning of the 19th century. For the past 200 years however, it has become very complicated indeed. I'm not going to offer a magic bullet to make that complexity go away. Are Jews the people who believe in a certain set of beliefs? Well, sort of, but not really, so no. Are they the people who live according to halachic precepts? Of course not, except when they do. Are they an ethnic group? Walk down the streets of Jerusalem and you'll be hard-put to say what a Jew is supposed to look like. (I remember the exciting moment some 20 years ago when I saw, for the first time, a Jew who really looked exactly what the anti-semitic caricatures said we're all supposed to resemble. I haven't seen him since, however).

Having said all that, there are things that can be said about what being Jewish is, and to ask if most of America's Jews share those characteristics to a significant extent.

The first, sadly, is that often being a Jew was something you were willing to die for. Not eager to die for, or course, but committed to the Jewish way of life to the extent that you'd not abandon it no matter what, come hell or high water or rampaging pogromists or devious designers of laws against Jews. Or suicide bombers on buses or in supermarkets. Like it or not, today's Jews are essentially all descended from forebears who responded to the willing-to-die question in the affirmative. Most of them weren't called upon to make the personal choice, but it was often there, in the near or distant background, and they, their grandchildren and their 10th and 20th generation descendants all answered in the affirmative. Those of their descendant who didn't may still carry the odd gene inherited from them but they're long since not Jewish.

The PEW researchers didn't ask their respondents if they're willing to die for being Jewish, but the answer is clear; they're not willing to make some considerably lesser requirements of themselves and their children.

The second, of course, is the matter of religious lifestyle. I'm carefully staying away from the question of religious belief, because dogma and theology have usually played only a minor role in Judaism. The Protestant concept of belief as an indicator of belonging is rare in Judaism, which means that even if some American Jews believe in a set of Jewish beliefs, if they're not committed to a recognizable way of Jewish life, it's not clear what help the belief is. What has always been important is a Jewish way of life. Since we're way beyond the days when this had to mean a halachic lifestyle it's harder to define, but it still has to be there.

Israelis have a Jewish lifestyle of a sorts by definition: they live in Hebrew, according to the Hebrew calender, in a society which understands itself as having important Jewish elements. Do America's Jews have a parallel phenomenon?

Not that I could find in the survey. In what was to me probably the single saddest finding of the survey, page 55 tells of what American Jews think is essential to their being Jewish. The totals are as follows:
Remembering the Holocaust - 73%
Leading an ethical and moral life - 69%
Working for Justice/equality - 56%
Being intellectually curious - 49%
Caring for Israel - 43%
Having a good sense of humor - 42%
Being part of a Jewish community - 28%
Observing Jewish law - 19%
Eating traditional Jewish foods - 14%.

Of course, there's not a single one of those qualities which contradicts being Jewish. Indeed, it would be fine if all Jews shared them all, so that the response would have been 100% down the whole line (assuming there are any consensual Jewish foods, which I doubt there are). But are these the essentials to being Jewish? The Holocaust happened 70 years ago, which means that for the first 30-plus centuries of Jewish history that element was absent.  The ethical and justice stuff reminds me of the time a German friend told me how proud he was of his Christian values, and I pointedly asked if there were any of them I couldn't also claim, without being a Christian. Intellectual curiosity and a sense of humor? As defining characteristics of Jewishness? Really? Isn't this a bit parochial and arrogant at the same time?

Which leaves us with belonging to a Jewish community, which the section of the survey which deals with the demographics informs us is weak and weakening, and the matter of Jewish law, which leaves no room for a secular form of Judaism.

I was astonished - or at least, I should have been, were I not such a pessimist - that Jewish learning didn't even appear as an option. In about two weeks I should finish my first cycle of Daf Yomi, which means I will have spent about 45 minutes a day racing over a blatt (double page) of the Talmud, every single day. Now, after 7 1/2 years (from summer of 2006 onwards), I am finally about to be able to say I've looked at every single page of the Talmud. Do I know the Talmud? Of course not. Not remotely. But at least I've acquired an idea about what's in it and have a somewhat better conception of what a Jewish scholar, a Talmid Hacham, spends his life at. The fact that a survey of American Jewry didn't notice that being an educated Jew might be an essential element of Jewish identity, at least for a minority, or at least as an ideal most people don't live up to, is devastating. At least it is to me. There was probably never a generation of Jews with a majority of scholars; but to the best of my knowledge all Jewish generations venerated learning of the Jewish canon.

Which brings me back to the title of this post. Jews have been a diverse bunch for a very long time. Yet in their diversity, there has always been among them a core of people who were committed to their Judaism at almost any cost, which gave them a staying power unique in the annals of Man, and thereby an unparalleled cultural longevity; and they have always shared a common ground, be it religious or linguistic or social, which formed a bond of commonality. When the first  Ashkenazi disciples of the Vilna Gaon's reach Jerusalem 200 years ago and found only Sephardi shuls, they deliberated joining the Sephardis or holding out for a minyan of their own. How many secular Israeli Jews would recognize many American Jewish synagogues? This would matter less if America's Jews were creating a viable and recognizably Jewish form of life. But are they? In what way?

So tell me where I'm wrong. So far as I can tell, the 22nd century will see a vibrant and diverse Jewish center in Israel, with small satelite communities in many places in the world, including in America. I appologize for being an arrogant Israeli.

Shalom Chaver: Farewell, Norm.

Norman Geras died yesterday. I never met him personally. We met through the blogosphere, where we linked to each other from time to time, and e-mailled back and forth when we wished to speak directly. His blog, Normblog, was a fount of erudite common sense; he was especially good when he clearly dissected the silliness of public discourse.

His final post, earlier this month, contained a list of books he had read and recommended. As a tribute to him, people might like to choose one of the titles they've never read, and read it. I certainly will try to.

Rest in peace, friend.

Baruch dayan emet.

Aharon Karov, Marathon Man

Back in January 2009, when this blog was still active, I began following the story of Aharon Karov, a young infantry lieutenant who was called to his unit less than 12 hours after his wedding and sent to battle in Gaza, where he was critically wounded. At the time the doctors didn't expect him to live. (My previous post on him, with links to all the previous ones, is here).

Today's edition of Makor Rishon (Hebrew, not online), tells that he and his wife Zvia now have two children, a 3-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy, that he's studying at university, and that he's flying to New York this week to run in the upcoming New York Marathon.

The Rav Ovadia as he meant to be

The Rav Ovadia is likely to prove the single person world-wide who dies in 2013, and whose works will still be read in 2113, 2213, and 2513. That's what happens with important Jewish scholars.

On September 3rd 2010 I posted on the Rav Ovadia. I'm putting it up again, in his honor, and also as food for thought for the multitudes of people who disliked him without ever taking the time to understand his world:


Rav Ovadia Yosef has done it again. During his televised Saturday night talk he called for the death of Mahmoud Abbas and "these Palestinians". Saeb Erekat denounced him for preaching genocide, the State Department chided, media outlets pontificated, and in Israel, where at least some people might have been expected to know better, public figures piled onto each other in their haste to condemn.

It seems, after all, a serious matter. Rav Yosef, who just turned 90, is the greatest living Sephardi rabbi, and arguably the most important halachic scholar of our day. One in eight Jewish Israelis vote for the Shas party he founded in the 1980s, and more hold him in highest esteem. Prime ministers and opposition leaders alike visit him to explain matters of state in the hope of gaining his support. He's important. And complex.
 

Along with his unfortunate penchant for expressing himself in earthy bluntness, Rav Yosef has been a revolutionary force for modernizing halachic thought and integrating it into modernity. Again and again he has courageously formulated rulings that contradicted those of all his peers. He found a way to permit and encourage organ transplants; he permitted artificial inseminations; in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War he swiftly freed almost a thousand women from Aginut, and the list goes on. Most famously, in the late 1980s he was the first important orthodox rabbi to announce that peace with the Palestinians is preferable to continued control of the West Bank.
 

How then to explain this week's outburst, let alone excuse it? By listening to him in his natural context.
 

The Rav Yosef doesn't use the Internet, has never encountered a blog, is unlikely ever to have read Haaretz and certainly doesn't follow the New York Times. He doesn't watch television, though his weekly talk is broadcasted live. Lesser men have invested decades in migrating the compendia of all halachic literature into a digital database, Bar Ilan University's Responsa Project; for a long time Rav Yosef didn't even know this was happening, nor did he care. He has read those tens of thousands of books, and knows what's in them. His world is about Jewish learning, Jewish belief, Jewish thought, imagery, and language. It is extraordinarily rich, but overlaps only partially with the secular world, and hardly at all with the world of international diplomacy or media. Had one asked him for the date of his inflammatory speech he'd have answered that it was the 19^th of Elul, not the 29^th of August.

Elul is a distinctive month. For orthodox Sephardi men, it can't be overlooked, as they rise daily at 3am to chant slichot, the mediaeval supplications for mercy. Since Rav Ovadia's words and their meaning come straight from the slichot, any attempt to evaluate what he was saying and what his audience heard ought to notice them.
 

Common wisdom tells that the high holidays are about personal reflection, balance taking, resolutions to improve and divine absolution. Indeed they are – partially. They are also about communal behavior, national survival, and God's obligation to protect his people and avenge them. The theme of the seven weeks between the beginning of Elul and the end of the high holidays is that we're unworthy sinners pleading for God's forgiveness, but also that we're miserable and down-trodden and may he raise us for the glory of his name. That second theme has a clear subtext, that we suffer for our adherence to him and therefore are worthy of his protection.
 

There are numerous examples; here are two. The Ata rav slichot (Thou art benevolent) supplication says

Terrified by their travails

By their revilers and persecutors

Please don't abandon them oh God of their fathers…

Deliver them in sight of everyone

Let the evil ones no longer rule over them

Or the Ase Lema'an (Do it for their sake) verse, repeated every day: Do it for Your Truth, do it for Your greatness, do it for Your name, do it for Your kingdom… do it for Abraham Isaac and Jacob, do it for David and Solomon, do it for Jerusalem… do it for the martyred for Your Oneness, do it for the massacred for Your name, do it for those burned and drowned sanctifying You, do it for infants suckling at the breast who did not sin…

After a month of daily supplication and shofar blowing, Rosh Hashana amplifies the themes in two full days of devotion, followed by another eight of supplication and finally the blast of Yom Kippur. The Yom Kippur service contains the agonizingly long and detailed description of how the Romans tortured ten great scholars to death, followed by Avinu Malkenu (Our Parent, our Sovereign), recited for ten days and repeatedly on Yom Kippur: Avinu Malkenu, abolish our persecution and the conniving of our enemies, thwart the intentions of our enemies, destroy our persecutors, silence them…

Tellingly, the haunting Barbara Streisand recording of Avinu Malkenu drops this part, as do many of the references one can find in Google. It's as if enlightened or secular modern Jews are uncomfortable with the overt violence in many of the texts of this highest of Jewish annual cycles. They misunderstand the meaning.

In the middle of the second century CE the Jews renounced the use of political power. The catastrophe of two defeats by Roman armies, the first destroying the Temple and the second depopulating Jerusalem and Judea, was too much to bear. The Mishna, followed by the Gemara, were so traumatized they succeeded in hiding the true extent of the destruction and horror; it took the archeologists and historians of the 20^th century to decipher the true enormity, especially of Hadrian's genocide. Instead, the Talmud concentrated on the loss of great scholars and the stubborn, sometime suicidal determination to pass on the teaching of Torah. Implicitly, and eventually explicitly, the Jews told themselves they had a pact with God. They would suffer in his name, but he would fight their wars; they might die for his law, but he wouldn't allow their enemies to win. Their personal fate might be terrible, the destinies of their community dire, but the nation would always survive, and the enemies – eventually – would be defeated.

The yearning for divine retribution, at times blood-curdling in its intensity, was a substitute for action and for the need, even the permissibility, of counterforce. No matter how harsh the persecution of the Jews, there was never any cycle of violence. Words of violence effectively replaced the violence itself for 18 long centuries.

Admittedly, this has changed. In the 20^th century the Jews returned to the use of national power. Most of them are secular, they no longer believe in a God to fight their battles for them, and not all of the violence they engage in is wise. The ancient traditions, however, are still there. When the Rav Yosef lifted the theme for his talk straight out of the prayer book, he wasn't calling for genocide, nor inciting to violence. On the contrary. He was continuing a quiescent tradition, by calling on God to do what the Jews won't do and shouldn't do.

There is no causal line from his words to deeds, nor did he intend there to be. He was speaking as a Jew does in Elul. Perhaps it's too much to expect anyone to respect him, but at least they might refrain from damning him.

Where if not in Jerusalem?

No-one really knows how many people attended the funeral of the Rav Ovadia Yosef last night. If it was 700,000, that's more than 10% of the Jewish population of the country. If it was 850,000, as published by some newspapers today, that's almost 11% of the entire population of Israel. No matter what the number, most of the participants were men, so that a similar number of women were left at home with the same mourning sentiments. The entire media agrees this morning that it was the largest funeral in Israel's history.

I think it was probably the largest in the entire long history of Judaism.  Think about it for a moment. The Talmud tells about millions of people who used to come to Jerusalem for the pilgrimages, but those aren't eye-witness reports, rather wistful recounts from a few generations after the destruction of the Temple. Even to the extent they're true, there's no legend of a mass funeral of anyone. From then until the late 19th century, there were no Jewish communities large enough to create such a crowd of mourners. Even in pre-Holocaust Europe, or New York at any point, there were never anything near six-plus millions Jews in a region the size of Israel. And anyway, that's the recent past, so we simply know: there were no comparable events, not of that size, any time in the 20th century, not even at the funerals of the Lubavitcher Rebbe or Menachem Begin.

So what we saw yesterday was the largest Jewish funeral ever. It was a combination of the death of a Jew of historical stature; his followers' confidence of ownership of the public space such that shutting down half a city was not given a second thought; and the simple fact of having enough of them to generate the numbers. All of which came together in the most important city in the Jewish world. Jerusalem.

Postscript: I may be attuned to this insight as I'm in the middle of reading that PEW report on American Jewry, which I may post about once I'm finished. The contrasts are stark, of course, not to say harsh. One of them is that the Rav Ovadia, whom Israeli Jews just gave the biggest sendoff in 3,000 years, was largely irrelevant to American Jewry. To the limited extent he was relevant, it was when they totally misunderstood what he was all about. I once wrote about this, a few years ago; if you wish, you can re-read that post as my obituary of him.

Jerusalem is Destined to Grow

Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi is one of the most quoted scholars in the Talmud - assuming he was one scholar and not two, which he may have been. Whether one or two, he or they lived a very long time ago, in the 3rd century give or take a generation. (And either he, or they, or someone else of the same name, seems to be buried until this very day in Mitch Pilcer's back yard in Zippori).

In any case. Back in the 3rd century Jerusalem was a small town, roughly the size of today's Old City, which is one square kilometer. Yet the Talmud on page 50a of the Pessachim tractate cites Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi as foretelling that in the future the city will be so large that a galloping horse will need half a day, from dawn until noon, to get from the edge of town to its center, and this in all directions.

I'm not an expert in galloping horses, but assuming one can gallop without stopping for all those hours, I expect the Jerusalem of 2013 hasn't yet reached the dimensions Yehoshua ben Lvi had in mind. Give us another 10-20 years and we'll get there, only 1,800 after he said we would.

(The Daf Yomi series, I remind you, is presented and explained here).

How Many Jews Followed those Rabbis?

Menachem Ellon passed away a few months ago. He was 89. As a mark of respect I took upon myself to finally read his magisterial two-volume study of Jewish Law, which has been on my shelf for decades but which I never read cover-to-cover. Since it's more than 1,500 pages long and makes no pretensions of being a beach-book, I gave myself the entire year of mourning to get thru it. So far I'm behind schedule, but I have finally gotten the hang of it and it's fascinating, so I may yet stay on target. It may even be the case that I'm getting more out of the reading now, than I would have had I read it back when I bought it; important books can be like that.

One of the very first things I learned from the book is the importance of Jewish law as a living and developing legal system from 2nd temple era right up until the 18th century in Europe, and even into the 20th century in Arab lands. I hadn't given this much thought, but the claim that Jews are a nation, not only a religion, is strongly bolstered by the fact that until just yesterday in terms of history, Jews were running their own nation with their own laws and their own legal system, and the system was mostly common to them all while distinct from their surroundings.

Which then raises the question about the numbers: OK, so the elite studied the common literature throughout the millennia. But what about the broad public? Hundreds of thousands of us study Daf Yomi these days, but how common was such an education a thousand years ago? Two thousand?

Actually, just the other day we daf-yomi-folks passed a troubling section in Pessachim (page 49 a and b). The Gemara had been talking, in an idle sort of way, about how marrying into a family of Cohanim could be a smart move; then, suddenly, it veered into a discussion about how the scholars and the general public couldn't stand each other. One should spend as much as it takes, even one's entire fortune if need be, to have one's daughter marry a scholar. If that's not possible, then the son of a just man; Not that, then the son of a leader of the community. Not that, then the son of a philanthropist. If even the son of a philanthropist couldn't be found, one should marry off one's daughter to a teacher. But in no case should one ever have his daughter marry an Am Haaretz, a coarse "man of the land", probably best translated as an unschooled yokel. This then set off a string of invective against the Ami Aratzot. Rabbi Akiva, perhaps the greatest of the scholars of his age, told how in his days as an Am Haaretz (he began learning only at 40) he wanted to bite the scholars like a donkey - and why a donkey rather than a dog? Because a donkey, unlike a dog, breaks the bone when he bites. His disciple, Rabbi Meir, then added that marrying one's daughter to an Am Haaretz is like binding her and laying her in the path of a lion, because the Ami Haaretz, like a hungry beast, tears apart his woman and has no shame. The Braita then continues: Ami Haaretz hate us scholars even more than the gentiles hate Jews; and worst of all are those who once learned with us and then left, since they know our opinion of all the others.

The sources for all these harsh sentiments are Mishnaic, i.e 1-2 century Tana'im in Israel; the Babylonian Amoraim of the following centuries who created the bulk of the Gemara seem simply to have passed on the story with no comment, which is unusual. On the other hand, no-one ever censored it, either. The section is still there, and as I said, we passed it last week.

This thread is presented and explained here.

Kushim and the "Nigger" Word

There's been a bit of excitement in the anti-Israeli twittersphere this week, following an unfortunate statement by the brand-new Chief Rabbi, David Lau, that yeshiva students ought to spend their time learning Torah and not watching basketball games, where "one bunch of kushis beats another bunch of kushis". Racism! shouted the badmouths. Jim Crow! Apartheid! If even the Chief Rabbi shamelessly uses the N-word in public, what better a demonstration of the profound rot of Israeli society!

But did he? The story of the word Kushi is actually more interesting than that.

First, it must be stressed, the word itself comes from the Bible, where it is used repeatedly, and so far as I know, exclusively, to describe people with black skin. The Bible doesn't seem to have anything against black people, and even the story where Miriam apparently made some derogatory statement about her kushi sister-in-law seems mostly to indicate the opposite: Moses himself was married to the black woman, and right after making the statement God himself struck her with a horrible skin affliction and she was publicly thrown out of camp for seven days.

As recently as the early 1970s, kushi was the perfectly innocuous word in the Hebrew language for black. Then the Americans began fiddling with their own language, renouncing the word Negro and replacing it first with Black, then with Afro-American. Those parts of Israeli society which are closely attuned to things American decreed that the ancient Hebrew word must also be expunged, because of the awful cultural baggage of Jim Crow and segregation.

But of course, Israel didn't have the awful cultural baggage of Jim Crow and segregation. For all its many warts and blemishes, Israel doesn't have the same historical complexes and traumas as the Americans do, just as the French Russians and Japanese don't have them. The way history works is that each group has its own story, its own radioactive themes, and its own indifference to the sensitivities of others. History makes a difference, but it makes a difference in different ways and different times and places.

The entire concept of Niggers is foreign to Israel. If one insists on attaching an ethnic slur to the word Kushi, it would probably be the Yiddish word Schwartze, which is indeed mildly derogatory, but in a belittling and condescending way, without any hatred attached. Indeed, given the Rav Lau's upbringing and cultural world, he was probably reprimanding the yeshiva students for admiring schwartze folks whose strength is in their brawn, rather than Jewish scholars whose strength was in their brain. I'd be very surprised if the Rav could formulate a coherent paragraph using the words Jim Crow, Brown vs Board of Education and Ralph Abernathy; on the other hand, if you're interested in the impact of 3rd century legal thought in Babylon on 13 century Jewish Metaphysics, I'll bet he can give you a fascinating lecture.

Someone needs to impress upon the new Chief Rabbi that his words now carry greater weight than they did last week, and he's got to be wise in choosing them. Demanding of him that he unlearn the language of the Bible because Israel-haters would have us believe that the word Kushi means Nigger is outlandish.

Anyone who tries to convince you that Rav lau is Bull Connor is shining a spotlight at themselves and proclaiming that their agenda isn't truth, it's to harm Israel no matter how much they need to distort.

The Sickening List of Palestinian Heroes

One of the demands made by Abu Mazen in order to be willing to return to the negotiating table to discuss having a Palestinian state has been that Israel release Palestinians who have been in Israeli jails since before the beginning of the Oslo process. Apparently Israel is about to accept this demand, and in my position as a civil servant I have no opinion on the matter one way or the other. However, a quick glance at the list should make any decent person blanche. Are these the heroes the Palestinians wish to celebrate? As a service to the public, I"m translating the list Y-net posted in Hebrew this evening (there's a short English-language summary here).

Karim Younes, murdered Avraham Bromberg in 1981.
Maher Kadr Younis, same murder. They are both Israeli citizens.
Issa Adb Rabo, murdered Revital Serri and Ron Levy, a young couple walking in the hills to the south of Jerusalem.
Ahmed Shehade, murdered a Palestinian suspected of collaborating with Israel.
Rafa Karage, murdered Aharon Avidar.
Mustafa Ganemat, murdered Meir Ben Yair and Michal Cohen.
Ziad Mahmoud, same murder.
Othman Bani-Hassin, murdered Leah Almakais and Josef Eliyahu.
Haze Saadi, same murder.
Mohamad Tos, a member of a group which murdered 5 Israelis.
Faiz Hur, murdered two Israelis.
Mouhamad Ashour, murdered David Caspi, an Israeli cab driver.
Ibrahim Abu Mouch, kidnapped and murdered Moshe Hamam. Israeli Arab.
Roushdi Abu Mouch, same murder. Israeli Arab.
Walid Daka, same murder. Israeli Arab.
Ahmed Jaabar murdered David Shaltiel.
Afou Shakir, same murder.
Mohamad Daud, murdered Ofra Mozes and her son Tal.
Yassin Hadir,murdered Yagal Shahaf.
Bashir Hatib, murdered Haim Taktuk and buried him under the floor of his store. He's an Israeli Arab.
Mahmoud Jabarin, murdered a suspected collaborator.
Jouma Adam, firebombed a bus and burned to their deaths Rachel Weiss, her three sons (one an infant), and David Delarosa, a soldier who tried to extract them from the burning bus.
Mahmoud Harbish, same murder.
Bilal Demara, murdered 70-year-old Holuocaust survivor Friedrich Rosenfeld.
Moustaffa Outhma, same murder.

I've had enough. The rest of the list contains men who murdered their employers, or murdered women, children, old men.

Update: Gideon Shaviv of CAMERA sends a link to a webpage where they've put up the entire list, in English.

Jerusalem doesn't have the advantages of Tiberius

It's been ages since I did a "daf yomi" post. (The idea was presented and explained here). So here's a quick one, about Jerusalem, from the Pesachim tractate we're currently crossing (page 8b, to be precise).

Rabbi Abin son of Rabbi Ada said in the name of Rabbi Itzhak: "Why aren't the fruit of Jerusalem as good as those of Genosar? (North of Tiberius, famous as the source of the best fruit of Erez Israel). So that the pilgrims won't say they've come to Jerusalem to eat its fruit, and there will be doubt if they came for the mitzva of the pilgrimage itself". Rabbi Dostai son of Rabbi Yannai said: "Why are the hot-springs of Tiberius not in Jerusalem? So that the pilgrims won't say they've come to Jerusalem to enjoy the hot-springs, and doubt will be cast on their motivation for the pilgrimage".

End of Conflict

As the dwindled number of readers of this blog know, these days I steer firmly away from the political discussion which used to be its main preoccupation - a price of being a civil servant. Today I'm going to try sailing close to the wind without stalling, so a word of explanation. In spite of the way it might seem, I"m not stating a political opinion of any sort here, not staking a position on the rights or wrongs of matters which are debated by various political parties. Rather, I'd like to comment on the structure of the Israeli-Arab conflict, irrespective of any specific proposals to resolve it.

In recent months I've had the occasion privately to discuss the efforts to obtain peace with a number of unusually well-informed observers of the conflict. Each of them has been American, Jewish or not; each of them has impressive command of the details and minutiae of the historical chronology and familiarity with the important and secondary historical and contemporary actors. Unlike the vast majority of pundits, these fellows (they've all been men) know what they're talking about.

Yet I've found the exact same chasm between my understanding of how the story could unfold and theirs; it has become clear to me that this difference is itself interesting and significant. In a nutshell, the issue is about the finality of peace agreements.

American history is probably unusual, in that the United States has rarely experienced anything resembling permanent conflict. The last time there was a war between the US and Canada was in the 18th century, when they weren't yet the US or Canada. The last war with Mexico was in the 1840s, two centuries ago. There were two rounds of war with England, both long ago (ending in 1812). There was one round with Japan, one each of the various little wars the United states has engaged in, two with Germany followed by uninterrupted peace. The single worst conflict the US ever had, its war of the 1860s, was a one-time affair; indeed, a century later there was a second round of sorts, which played out with great drama, some violence, and no warfare whatsoever. And of course, the long conflict with the native inhabitants of the continent was resolved by their effective disappearence.

You could forgive Americans for the idea that conflicts are fought resolved and ended, to be continued, at very worst, on non-military fields. Indeed, such historical optimism probably lies under the widespread receptivity to books such as Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker, of course, doesn't limit himself to North American history. His theses is that humanity as a whole is weaning itself of violence on all levels, and the Long Peace of post-WW2 Europe and the New Peace of much of the rest of the world are permanent; the rest of humankind simply has to catch up and calm down.

A perceptive reading of Pinker, however, ought to remind us of the simple fact that throughout most of history, peace agreements at the ends of wars were temporary affairs. When one side destroyed the other, they could last for centuries; but when both sides remained standing, they often returned to battle sooner or later, in the same configuration or in a different one. The Bible aspires for "forty years of peace", which is a reasonable approximation of "permanent".

Pinker's conception rests on more than the statistical fact that since 1945 there have been (almost) no wars in Europe and that at the beginning of the 21st century there are fewer conflicts than usual worldwide. He shows how multiple things have changed, so that nowadays people don't regard war-making as an option for resolving conflicts.

But there-in lies the rub, as I pointed out when I recently reviewed his book. In order for a peace agreement to be the prelude to lasting peace, it must obviously be fair enough that all sides prefer it over the continuation of conflict, and more important, the vast majorities of the populations must cease to regard war as an option. These are two very different things.

My thesis here is that the people striving for peace between Israel and Arabs are working hard at attaining the first, while assuming that the second will necessarily follow. This assumption, however, makes sense only if something has changed in the character of the peoples involved. If Jews and Arabs (not only Palestinians) have together reached the same stage of history the nations of the Long Peace have reached, then indeed, a peace agreement between them is likely to usher in a permanent Middle East Peace.

Must I elaborate on how utterly silly that is, in 2013?

I'll close on the point I began at. I am not advocating for or against any particular proposal to create agreement between Israel and Arabs. Since my children all live here, I have the greatest of interests in their living in peace. What I am saying is that the peace makers need to be striving not for a magic combination of gestures and moves on the ground which will call forth a peace-signing ceremony on the lawn of the White House. They need to be creating a new reality. If all they achieve is the goal of an agreement without changing the essentials, they will have created an interlude in the conflict. At worst, they might even create the motivation for the next round.

Idan Reichel at Cesarea

It's been a long time since I did a "Shirim Ivri'im" post. (The thread was introduced here, and the whole series is tagged with the "shirim I'vri'im" lable). Well, last week we went to hear Idan Reichel, easily one of Israel's most talented and popular musicians, at Cesarea, where there's an open-air theatre built by the Romans about 2,000 years ago. I don't know how large the crowd was - five thousand, perhaps. There were grade-school kids there, and retirees, and everyone in between. Reichel and his group pun on a wonderful show as usual with him, the music was very diverse. Here's an i-phone recording by someone who was seated close to the stage. The quality isn't particularly good, soory, but if you listen carefully you'll see that, yes, the lyrics and the music are... Arabic.

Israeli society is more complicated than it's made out to be.




 One of the more touching songs was Maya Avrahams rendition of Ya Mama. However, since I can't find a Youtube version of reasonable quality, here's a recording of the same popular song by Shimon Buskila.

Yes, also Arabic.
 

And since we're on the topic of Reichel's multi-lingual recordings, here's one of the most famous of all

A Secluded Corner of Jerusalem You've Never Seen

It's on Mount Zion, but I doubt that will help.

Reviewing a Book About Settlements

It's very hard to write with any real accuracy about the settlement project, or at least about Israel's intentions, policies and actions, unless you've seen the archival material - which no-one has, because most of it has yet to be declassified. Gershon Gorenberg, however, has done a valiant job, in his book The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977. Since I no longer blog on politically charged topics, I've posted my review in the lion's mouth: on the blog of the Israel State Archives, of all places.

Links fixed

Apparently a few hundred people visit this blog daily, even tho I only post to it rarely. Most visitors seem to be looking at old stuff. Some of the things they're looking for are the long-ish essays I wrote from time to time, stored on Google Docs, and linked to from the blog. Then, sometime last year, perhaps when Google moved us from Docs to Drive, the links were all broken. For months now I've been getting e-mails with requests to see a file I thought I'd posted years ago.

So today I went back and changed the status of all those essays in Google Drive, from private (which was never my intention), to public (which is what they all used to be). I hope this will fix the problem, and if not, please write in and tell me.

Most important, of course: thank you to all the folks who are reading my back-copies! Who'd have thunk?

Have Israeli Archives been Hiding Files?

Over the weekend Shai Hazkani published a long article in Haaretz about Israeli crimes in 1948 and attempts to cover them up, first by David Ben Gurion and now, in recent years, by the archives. I'm not going to deal with the content of the article itself. However, I was perturbed by Hazkani's claim that unpleasant files which had been opened in the 1990s have recently been re-sealed, even though in the meantime historians had seen them and quoted from them. Given that I"m the State Archivist, I received a number of enquiries from various folks: "Tell us it ain't so, Yaacov!"

So I looked into the matter by contacting Haaretz and eventually talking to Hazkani so as to understand what he was describing. The answer is troubling.

First, it's not the censor. There is a censor in Israel, but she and her team don't deal with influencing historical narratives, only with stopping publications which contain an immediate danger to Israeli security, and they're watched closely by various agencies, chief of them being the Supreme Court. They have a very narrow mandate, and they stay within it.

It's not the State Archives, at least not as a policy of blocking uncomfortable or unpleasant documentation. The readers of our blog may have noticed this. However, it turns out there have been cases where declassifiers have re-sealed files, when their directives have been sharpened. Finally, there are the declassifiers at the IDF Archives: when I asked them they confirmed that indeed, some files have been re-sealed because of their content.

So Hazkani at Haaretz was right.

Now what? Since I stopped being a blogger and became a civil servant, I acquired authority and responsibility, but lost the luxury of simply speaking out on whatever topic crossed my mind. (I also mostly stopped bogging). On this matter, also: I can no longer simply say how I think things need to be without much chance of influencing them to be that way. I need to address the full complexity of the matter, and deal with all the stakeholders. I can hope to change things within my sphere of authority, but I must use the tools the system has given me, not those I used to use. It's trade-off: I may be able to change things (and I many not), but I can't simply spout opinions.

So on that note I'll have to end this report, at least until - and if - there's something else to report on.

Review: My Father was a Freedom Fighter

A few months ago a twitter correspondent suggested I should read Ramzy Baruod's book My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story. If memory serves, the suggestion was something of a taunt, or a dare, along the lines of "let's see if you've got the guts to read such an important book, and if you can deal with it honestly". So the next time I was at Amazon I purchased a copy, and have now finished reading it. As could have been predicted, my reading is a bit different from that of my correspondent, so here's a quick review.

Baroud's book is not particularly well written, as, say, Raja Shehadeh's is. Yet it is interesting and I'm glad I read it. I discerned three major levels in it, the personal, the historical and the political.

The personal is the poignant story of the author's father, Mohammed Baroud, along with lesser strands about his grandfather and his mother, all of whom were born in the town of Beit Daras before 1948, and all of whom eventually died in the Nuseirat camp in the Gaza strip. One can - indeed, should - be careful when telling the story of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, even when inevitably taking sides, but Israelis should be able to accept that the personal stories of Palestinian individuals whose lives were harshly changed by the events of 1948 are tales of woe, misfortune and yearning for an earlier time. Was there a river that flowed near Beit Daras in whose pools Muhammad swam "endlessly" as a boy? Of course not. Were the battles of 1948 which emptied the town naked Israeli aggression with the gunning down of large numbers of women and children? No, and no. Were the ensuing decades of misery in Gaza the inevitable result of intentional Israeli policies? Of course not. Yet for all the disagreements about simple facts and complex interpretations, the fundamental outlines of the personal story are true, and tragic. His grandparents and parents were uprooted from their ancestral home, and life never went back to being normal for them. Many many millions of people in Europe and Asia were likewise uprooted in the 1940s, including Jews, and some built new lives and others didn't, but the general shouldn't hide the specific; we as Israelis can afford to accept that the lives of many Palestinians were ruined by their conflict with us, especially in the 1940s.

We can also accept that life for Palestinians during the 1st Intifada was most unpleasant, and their interactions with the IDF often extremely negative. Why this was so is a different question, but that it was so, seems to me beyond argument.

The historical level of Baroud's book is, simply, silly. His depiction of Israel and Israelis lacks any factual plausibility; his repeated claim that Israel succeeds at what it does because of American interventions is odd given that he has chosen to make his own life in America (Seattle, apparently). His chronology is often manipulative; one example among many is when he tells of Netanyahu's electoral victory in 1996 first, and then only recounting the fact that Hamas was blowing up Israeli citizens by the dozens a few pages later, so the ignorant reader can't see any possible connection. He often confuses his chronology in such a way, to the extent it's hard to maintain that he's merely confused. His footnotes (as an archivist I often take note of footnotes) are abysmal as historical sources. Even his over-arching thesis - that his father was a freedom fighter - is true only in a metaphorical way, in that his father despised Israel all his life, even as his best commercial enterprises seem to have been conducted with Israelis. His treatment of the history of Palestinians as subjects of history, as actors rather than passive objects, is extremely confused at its best, and disingenuous as a general rule. Which brings us to the third level of the book, the political.

The politics of the book are probably their most valuable, and focus mostly on the period since the beginning of the Oslo process in 1993 until the present (the book was published in 2010). This is the section diplomats, pundits, journalists and observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict need to read. The way Baroud sees it, and he presents his position as being mainstream and representative, the entire Oslo process was a conspiracy to harm the Palestinians; it was a machination by Israel, America, and a corrupt PLO leadership to screw the Palestinians, prevent their attaining their rights, and defeat their honorable struggle. True, his appraisal of Yasser Arafat is complex, but his disdain for the rest of the PA leadership is palpable. At one point, speaking  of his father, he makes it very clear that the only possible just outcome of any peaceful resolution of the conflict must of course include his return to Beit Daras. Any Palestinian political leadership which accepts anything less than that is illegitimate, and probably made up of lackeys of Israel and America.

I'm on record as having accepted the need for Palestinian independence alongside Israel since the 1970s. There's nothing in this book to suggest there's a significant group of Palestinians who agree with me, while there is much in it to suggest that Palestinian figures who negotiate with Israelis lack legitimacy among their own people. It's one book, by one man, and there may be other voices among the Palestinians, but it's no less depressing for all that.

Joseph Brodsky, Watermark

I recently read Joseph Brodsky's little book Watermark. I enjoyed it thoroughly, though I can't tell you what it's about. I mean, well, of course I can: it's about Venice, and Brodsky's annual visits to the city over many years, always in the middle of winter. So it's sort of a memoir, and a bit of a travel book, and of course it's a reflection on life and beauty , but having said all that, I still can't tell you what it's about. Since it's only 135 pages long, and the typeset is large with big spaces, you could probably read the whole thing in an hour or two at the most - but that would be a shame. Better to read a few pages each time, then set it aside and come back later. That way you'll enjoy it over a few weeks, if you pace yourself well enough.

Some wonderful friends sent me the book when they heard we were going to Venice, but by the time it arrived we'd already been there and were back. That was, oh, three years ago I think, and it was pure coincidence that I noticed it on the shelf last month. Reading it wasn't as good as being there, but as memory lanes go, it was surprisingly effective. So I'd say, if you're planning to go to Venice, read the book first. If you've already been, read it now. If you don't know why you might wish to go there, read it and you'll know. And if you're determined never to go to Venice (why would anybody do that?), read Brodsky's strange but compelling book and regret your decision.

At sunset all cities look wonderful, but some more so than others. Reliefs become suppler, columns more rotund, capitals curlier, cornices more resolute, spires starker, niches deeper, disciples more draped, angels airborne. In the streets it gets dark, but it is still daytime for the Fondamenta and that gigantic liquid mirror where motorboats, vaporetti, gondolas, dinghies, and barges "like scattered old shoes" zealously trample Baroque and Gothic facades, not sparing your own or a passing cloud's reflection either. "Depict it", whispers the winter light, stopped flat by the brick wall of a hospital, or arriving home at the paradise of San Zaccaria's frontone after its long passage through the cosmos. And you sense this light's fatigue as it rests in Zaccaria's marble shells for another hour or so, while the earth is turning its other cheek to the luminary. This is the winter light at its purest. It carries no warmth or energy, having shed them and left them behind somewhere in the universe, or in the nearby cumulus. Its particles' only ambition is to reach an object and make it, big or small, visible. It's a private light, the light of Giorgione or Bellini, not the light of Tiepolo or Tintoretto. And the city lingers in it, savoring its touch, the caress of the infinity whence it came. An object, after all, is what makes infinity private. (p.80)

Hannah Arendt in a false Jerusalem

The other day we went to see the new film about Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe von Trotta (2012). If you're into Batman films or other Christopher Nolan intelligent flics, this one isn't for you. It's slow, thoughtful, in two languages, and very well made. There is no action of the sort that Hollywood would recognize. It's about Arendt's trip to Jerusalem for Adolf Eichmann's trial in 1961 and the book she wrote about it, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin Classics) - a book with one of the most important subtitles ever: a Report on the Banality of Evil.

Arendt was once a serious presence in my life. It turns out that shortly before she traveled to Jerusalem she spent an evening at our home in Chicago, though given my young age I was probably sent to bed before she arrived. As an undergraduate I read her magnificent The Origins of Totalitarianism (HBK) - easily one of the most intellectually exciting books I'd read. When I submitted my doctoral proposal for research into the decision-making process in the SS, using Eichmann's office as a case study, I noted that a side affect of the investigation would be to bolster Arendt's Banality thesis with solid historical documentation.

Well, that didn't work out. As I ploughed my way through tens of thousands of pages of Nazi documents and secondary sources about it, I was forced to recognize that she had got it all wrong. There was no banality there whatsoever, but there was personal brutality and viciousness, in the context of a profound and all-pervasive hatred of Jews. I eventually published my findings, in Hitler's Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil, which had a pretty good run as turgid history books go, and was published in four languages, but never made the tiniest dent in the popularity of Arendt's thesis. Which is OK, given her stature and my lack of one.

Von Trotta's film tells the story of the creation of the Banality of Evil book and its initial reception; the fun in watching it is that we all know the end of the story: while some folks didn't initially like it, eventually it became one of the more famous books of the 20th century, so that there was a happy ending, even if it took a while to arrive - after the end of the film.

I'm not going to argue with her anymore - I've moved on from that. It's a fine film, and I recommend it.

The point I'd like to make is about one of the most minor scenes in the film. In early 1961 Arendt arrives in Jerusalem. The film puts her in St Andrew's Scottish Church, which I think didn't happen but could have, I suppose. From the balcony there's a great view of the western wall of the Old City, and when she first arrives she meets an old friend, a fellow German-born Jew, and they briefly enjoy the view, while commenting "So this is your Jerusalem!"; the camera pans along the wall of the Old City.

Which is of course nonsense. In 1961 anyone sitting on that balcony looking at the view would have noticed that there was a harsh border running right down the middle of it, with hostile snipers occasionally shooting at each other across it. No one would have celebrated "their Jerusalem"; any sane person would have mourned the tragic tearing apart of one of the world's oldest and most famous cities. Indeed, a visitor to the city would have sought out such vantage points so as to see the extent of the travesty, and the imbecility of dividing a city.

A German film director born in 1942 and thus old enough to remember the division of Berlin and Jerusalem, of all people, could be expected not to be so silly. Or maybe not: maybe that's too much to expect.