Jew in a Blog

Yiddish; anti-Orthodoxy; genuine Marx-worship; science fiction; Walter Benjamin; WWI -- even some shoutouts to my kin of all Jewish ethnicities, but usually this is Ashkie and Germanophone-centric.

[dr-treyf]

been reading this book about the short spanish-american war and the much longer debate over american imperialism and annexation that followed. it's very funny to see parallels to zionism with regards to different sides of the discourse. those in favor of annexing the philippines rely on the fact that, for over a hundred years, white people had already been conquering and annexing the continent. there's no reason they should stop at the pacific ocean. this side, personified by teddy roosevelt and henry cabot lodge, kind of have a better grasp on history than those opposed to annexation, who rely only on moral arguments rather than precedent. reminds me of right wing zionists who justify annexing the west bank by arguing that jews already kicked out arabs in the nakba, so why stop now?LikeCommentShare

[dr-treyf]

“In our writing, opposites that in happier periods fertilized one another have become insoluble antinomies. Thus science and belles-lettres, criticism and production, education and politics, fall apart in disorder. The theater of this literary confusion is the newspaper, its content ‘subject-matter’ which denies itself any other form of organization than that imposed on it by the readers’ impatience. And this impatience is not just that of the politician expecting information, or of the speculator on the lookout for a tip; behind it smolders that of the man on the sidelines who believe he has the right to see his own interests expressed. 

The fact that nothing binds the reader more tightly to his paper than this impatient longing for daily nourishment has long been exploited by the publishers, who are constantly opening new columns to his questions, opinions, protests. Hand in hand, therefore, with the indiscriminate assimilation of facts, goes the equally indiscriminate assimilation of readers who are instantly elevated to collaborators. In this, however, a dialectic moment is concealed: the decline of writing in the bourgeois press proves to be the formula for its revival in that of Soviet Russia. 

For as writing gains in breadth what it loses in depth, the conventional distinction between author and public, which is upheld by the bourgeois press, begins in the Soviet press to disappear. For the reader is at all times ready to be come a writer, that is, a describer, but also a prescriber. As an expert -- even if not on a subject but only on the post he occupies -- he gains access to authorship. 

Work itself has its turn to speak. And the account it gives of itself is a part of the competence needed to perform it. Literary qualification is founded no longer on specialized but, rather, on polytechnic education, and is thus public property. It is, in a word, the literarization of the conditions of living that masters the otherwise insoluble antinomies, and it is in the theater of the unbridled debasement of the word -- the newspaper -- that its salvation is being prepared.”

-- Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer, 1934

[dr-treyf]

I remember a Passover Seder from about ten years ago when I moved to New York. It was with my then girlfriend’s extended family: a rich Belgian financier second cousin, the plastic surgeon wife with her office that was actually inside their massive Upper East Side townhouse where we sedered, and the daughter who worked for AIPAC. As we read the story of our liberation from bondage in a traditional “conservadox” Haggadah we were waited on by a staff comprised of women of color. 

A scene from the Passover story I’ve always loved is when Moses kills the Egyptian guard for beating a Hebrew slave. Moses does this, if i remember correctly, before he realizes that he is also a Hebrew. Moses kills someone who he believes is still part of his extended family. Leftist Jews should take this as a metaphor, and understand that the vast majority of Jews all over the world are not on our side. They have become complacent in their own contemporary versions of Egypt: capitalism, whiteness and zionism. This parallels the Midrash, I think, about many Hebrews not wanting to leave bondage. I will let others quibble about what should be in the Haggadah. I don’t really care. 

[tuttieroi]

Italian soldiers attending mass, WWI

[dr-treyf]

had an interesting debate on twitter with this guy who thinks “anti americanism” is silly/besides the point because, “america is just one node - albeit the central node - in a dense world-systemic web of imperial power that emanates from the immanent laws of capital, not out of some uniquely american predisposition towards violence or domination ie american empire is epiphenomenal to the system”  i disagree. without getting too essentialist, there are unique circumstances in every country that abet racial capitalism. the settler colonial founding of the US, the continuance of slavery until one of the bloodiest wars of all time, the crackdown on radical reconstruction...the list goes on. 

if you argue that every western nation is alike in their ability to uphold neo colonialism, then you’re ignoring specific cultural or social phenomena that allow those countries to uphold neo colonialism in the first place. just because nationalisms are alike does not mean they’re all the same. 

a similar question one could ask: was there something unique about germany and other european powers that lead to fascism? 

[dr-treyf]

Let America Be America Again by Mitchell Siporin, 1936

[dr-treyf]

Some passages from “For Cause and Comrades” by James McPherson

[dr-treyf]

wondering if there’s a critique or historical analysis of -- i’m not sure what to call it -- the fact that for various identities, there are arise respective organizations that purport to represent them. in the US the tuskegee institute, women groups, the massive jewish non profit sector. 

easy to talk about feudal/communal identity groups, but the transition to modern capitalism and the specific roles that these bourgeois organizations play, the hegemony they exert, is an obvious shift. 

[dr-treyf]

i have a lot of sympathy for anti idpol critiques but as loose group those people make one basic mistake that makes them border on the conspiratorial: they somehow think idpol or intersectional theories, like, supersede capitalism. but why would certain theories be more powerful than the socio-economic base that's able to domesticate and defang them? it's not very marxist if you think rhetoric or theory is the driver of change! my criticism of idpol is similar to how i feel about religion: despite all the lofty morals, how has (mostly white, western) religion come to be so connected to nationalist and imperial power? is there a similar weakness to, say, feminism that makes it acceptable for people to think "leaning in" is feminist? does feminism have a relationship to capitalism the way religion is has a relationship with nationalism? 

in all honesty, i worry about similar weaknesses when it comes to socialism: people holding up Bernie and AOC as socialist leaders, people who say “socialism is when the government does good things,” anti communist segments of DSA, and that sort of thing. 

[dr-treyf]

[dr-treyf]

i might try being less mean to non profit hacks but idk it's important to me at this point that i make clear i am not represented by even the decent jewish non profits out there. i resent that people think there's a 'jewish left' when it's really people with decent jobs positioning themselves as leaders. 

even if some staff members at non profits are radical or whatever (this used to be me), the entire model is suspect. the funding of non profits is built on "double exploitation": wealthy donors whose capital already comes from labor then redirect their money to philanthropy and to salaries when it should be going directly to other things. 

socially, i think jewish non profits in particular are cringey. granted a lot of activism utilizes hokey spiritual rhetoric and this is fine for some people but i personally can't stand it. when it's done by spineless non profits it seems like they're standing in for organized religion or something. it's good to have an alternative to mainstream religion but i feel like those drawn to non profit activism tend to ignore how fucked up religion is. 

[dr-treyf]

“Likewise, activating our white Jewish family members’ and peers’ identification as victims—even if only in historical terms—can, counterintuitively, make it more difficult for them to confront their role in the maintenance and perpetuation of white supremacy. Summoning memories of the Holocaust and other experiences of antisemitism invites Jews to imagine themselves as the victims of racial violence, which can foreclose possibilities for seeing themselves, today, as complicit. We see evidence of this in the way that invoking simplified comparisons between antisemitism and anti-Blackness frequently opens the door to a counterproductive litigation of differences: “But we never rioted,” “But Nazism was so much worse,” and so on. It is precisely the crudeness of these comparisons that leave them vulnerable to such litigation: The historical forms of economic exploitation and exclusion, of state and extrajudicial violence, and of ideological antagonism vary between antisemitism and anti-Blackness as much as, if not more than, they coincide.”

-- Against Analogy

[dr-treyf]

“Mrs. Sarah Logue....

You say you have offers to buy me, and that you shall sell me if I do not send you $1000, and in the same breath and almost in the same sentence, you say, 'You know we raised you as we did our own children.’ Woman, did you raise your own children for the market? Did you raise them for the whipping post? Did you raise them to be driven off, bound to a coffle in chains? ... Shame on you!

But you say I am a thief, because I took the old mare along with me. Have you got to learn that I had a better right to the old mare, as you call her, than Manasseth Logue had to me? Is it a greater sin for me to steal his horse, than it was for him to rob my mother’s cradle, and steal me?...Have you got to learn that human rights are mutual and reciprocal, and if you take my liberty and life, you forfeit your own liberty and life? Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?

If you or any other speculator on my body and rights, wish to know how I regard my rights, they need but come here, and lay their hands on me to enslave me...”

Yours, etc. J. W. Loguen

[dr-treyf]

From Mark Rudd, a Jewish leader of the New Left in the 60s, on Jews/Judaism and social justice:

"Perhaps our anger was derived in some unconscious way from the famed prophetic tradition in Judaism, but I had never experienced any of it. Our rabbi at Congregation Beth El, Dr. Theodore Friedman, never to my knowledge preached about the legal discrimination against Negroes in the South, even as the civil rights movement raged on for more than a decade. Nor did I ever hear mention in shul of any relationship between those of us in the all-white suburbs to our black neighbors in adjacent Newark, N.J., other than thankfulness that we had gotten the hell out of there.

This is not to say that there weren’t decent rabbis and Jewish leaders who were active in civil rights. Years later I became aware of Rabbi Joachim Prinz of Temple B’nai Abraham in Newark, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, both side-kicks of Dr. Martin Luther King. They are said to have been very influential, though I didn’t know about them at the time.

From my own experience I’m forced to disagree with the theory that there’s something special and inherent in our religion which leads us to social activism, altruism, and the left. My former rabbi, Lynn Gottlieb, was fond of telling us that the Torah enjoins us to 'honor the stranger because we were strangers in Egypt' forty-six or one hundred and seventeen times. Whatever the number, it was probably one of those laws that needed to be reiterated continually because nobody was observing it."

Mark Rudd — Why were there so many Jews in SDS? (or, The Ordeal of Civility)

[dr-treyf]

Reference to a Bertolt Brecht song in Berlin Alexanderplatz

[dr-treyf]

“In the previous substitutes for the community, in the state, etc, personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed within the relationships of the ruling class, and only in so far as they were individuals of this class. The illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined, always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and was at the same time, since it was the combination of one class over against another, not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well. In the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association.

It follows from all we have been saying up till now that the communal relationship into which the individuals of a class entered, and which was determined by the common interests over against a third party, was always a community to which these individuals belonged only as average individuals, only in so far as they lived within the conditions of existence of their class --  a relationship in which they participated not as individuals but as members of a class.

With the community of revolutionary proletarians on the other hand, who take their conditions of existence and those of all members of society under their control, it is just the reverse; it is as individuals that the individuals participate in it.” 

[dr-treyf]

The NYRB classics cover of Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz is a piece called Down with Liebknecht by George Grosz. It’s a perfect choice because Döblin also wrote a series of novels about the Spartacist uprising.