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Bless me anyway
In which I shine up my little bit of political.
This morning, I read an article in the Boston Globe which mentioned in passing that Brandeis University's decision to honor Tony Kushner with an honorary degree is being protested—I presume on the grounds that he is pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, the same complaints that I heard when Munich came out. As an alumna of Brandeis and a fan of Tony Kushner's work, I confess myself puzzled. And as a cultural Jew, I suppose. Not for nothing, I always thought, is there told the joke about two Jews on a desert island and three synagogues.* Whatever happened to diversity of opinion?
From Tony Kushner's liner notes to the Klezmatics' Possessed (1997)**, cut so as not to eat people's screens.
I want to be both a God-believing Jew and a historical materialist socialist humanist agnostic. I want the State of Israel to exist (since it does anyway) and I want the cave of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs honored and I want to shokl with Jews at the Wailing Wall and at the same time (and I'm afraid this won't help sales of your CD) I think the founding of the State of Israel was for the Jewish people a historical, moral, political calamity. Contemplating the possible destruction of Israel (civil war?) I feel at times if I could ever kill for a nationalist cause, I might kill for that one but at the same time I wish modern Israel hadn't been born; I am a diasporan Jew, not a Zionist; and I say this feeling that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, is, its Zionist agenda and homophobia notwithstanding, Jewish history's best most eloquent single answer to Hitler and the Holocaust; and is so because it is in Jerusalem but I wish Jerusalem was an international city under a U.N. protectorate; and I wish the Museum of the Holocaust in Washington was a Museum of the Jewish-American Experience instead, with a holocaust wing, and I wish it stood on the Mall alongside museums devoted to the sufferings and triumphs of other ethnic-American groups, including a museum of the African-American experience, with a Slavery wing, which I wish was built with, in addition to other funding sources, Tsedakah from committed, determinedly anti-racist Jewish-Americans.
Identity ought to move from a politics of recognition, celebration and liberation towards its utopian goal of ultimate effacement: somewhere, far in the future, on the same far horizon beyond which lies the withering of state, the arrival of Moshiach, and the termination of my psychotherapy—there also lies the whispering away of the lovely alluring historical grit, the gorgeous gruff textural and aromal specificity of ethnic identity, of race; of the need for rehearsing and even remembering the agonizing, glorious, heroic histories of oppression—there also lies the Unity beyond Difference, Internationalism, the Creole and Mulatto World, Paradisiacal, the passage through Babel back to Eden, God's purpose from the start.
Are we not possessed, and is your CD's title not apt, by the multitudes we contain, not only multitudes of observant and unobservant brave martyred ancestors, not only of the hosts of spirits and demons who parade through our dreams and nightmares, but of all the cultures through which we have wandered, which we helped to shape, in which we are at home and never at home?
Hebrew- and Yiddish-illiterate, I barely know how to pray; riddled with ambivalence, child of Marx, Freud, Mahler, Benjamin, Kafka, Goldman, Luxemburg, Trotsky, An-ski, Schoenberg, mongrel product of Judaism's and of Jewish exteriority, of its ghetto-hungry curiosity, of its assimilationist genius, I now approach Judaism as Jews once approached the splendid strangeness of the Goyishe Velt: I am shall we say deeply confused, but not complacent. And this I think of course is profoundly Jewish. So perhaps I can write your liner notes after all.
For this, he shouldn't receive an honorary degree? I am even more puzzled when I read that the commencement speech will be delivered by a prince of the royal house of Jordan, whom no one seems to be protesting—and the point is not that they should start, but that if people are to criticize the university for its endorsement of an insufficiently Jewish playwright, it seems a little inconsistent tacitly to approve of its endorsement of an Arabic royal. Because, after all, doesn't it all come down to Us and Them . . .
I'm sarcastic because I genuinely do not understand, and I've arrived late to this controversy in any case. But I seem to remember also that Brandeis is a secular school (whose academic calendar revolves around the Jewish ritual year), and that writers are awarded honorary degrees for their art, not their politics (which are perhaps simultaneous for Tony Kushner), and that the American Jewish community is not monolithic (and nevertheless causes me to feel like an alien in its mainstream), and I have not expressed myself on this matter anywhere near as eloquently as I think the situation deserves. Or perhaps it doesn't deserve much more than my desire that Tony Kushner receive his honorary degree without further ruckus, and that this whole silliness cease and desist as promptly as possible. Israel isn't Judaism. Tony Kushner isn't the Anti-Moshiach.*** And I think we all have better issues to argue over.
(For example, if my bathroom walls suffer from tzara'at, do I still need to call in a priest or just sue my landlords? Discuss. I'm not losing my shower curtain again.)
At the very least, I do.
*I don't remember its provenance; I assume I encountered it first in Leo Rosten's fabulous Dictionary of Yiddish. The general gist is argumentativeness: one synagogue for one, another for the other, and then the third that both of them can agree never to set foot in. My grandfather points out that the joke isn't about two Jews, two synagogues, and a church, but still.
**Which I notice has recently gained, on amazon.com, a viciously anti-Kushner "review" that says nothing about the music and everything about the reviewer's narrow-minded paranoia. At least the other one-star review has the grace to dislike only the album.
***Look, you find a better equivalent for the expression "isn't the Antichrist." I'm not as familiar with Jewish apocalyptica as I should be.
This morning, I read an article in the Boston Globe which mentioned in passing that Brandeis University's decision to honor Tony Kushner with an honorary degree is being protested—I presume on the grounds that he is pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, the same complaints that I heard when Munich came out. As an alumna of Brandeis and a fan of Tony Kushner's work, I confess myself puzzled. And as a cultural Jew, I suppose. Not for nothing, I always thought, is there told the joke about two Jews on a desert island and three synagogues.* Whatever happened to diversity of opinion?
From Tony Kushner's liner notes to the Klezmatics' Possessed (1997)**, cut so as not to eat people's screens.
I want to be both a God-believing Jew and a historical materialist socialist humanist agnostic. I want the State of Israel to exist (since it does anyway) and I want the cave of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs honored and I want to shokl with Jews at the Wailing Wall and at the same time (and I'm afraid this won't help sales of your CD) I think the founding of the State of Israel was for the Jewish people a historical, moral, political calamity. Contemplating the possible destruction of Israel (civil war?) I feel at times if I could ever kill for a nationalist cause, I might kill for that one but at the same time I wish modern Israel hadn't been born; I am a diasporan Jew, not a Zionist; and I say this feeling that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, is, its Zionist agenda and homophobia notwithstanding, Jewish history's best most eloquent single answer to Hitler and the Holocaust; and is so because it is in Jerusalem but I wish Jerusalem was an international city under a U.N. protectorate; and I wish the Museum of the Holocaust in Washington was a Museum of the Jewish-American Experience instead, with a holocaust wing, and I wish it stood on the Mall alongside museums devoted to the sufferings and triumphs of other ethnic-American groups, including a museum of the African-American experience, with a Slavery wing, which I wish was built with, in addition to other funding sources, Tsedakah from committed, determinedly anti-racist Jewish-Americans.
Identity ought to move from a politics of recognition, celebration and liberation towards its utopian goal of ultimate effacement: somewhere, far in the future, on the same far horizon beyond which lies the withering of state, the arrival of Moshiach, and the termination of my psychotherapy—there also lies the whispering away of the lovely alluring historical grit, the gorgeous gruff textural and aromal specificity of ethnic identity, of race; of the need for rehearsing and even remembering the agonizing, glorious, heroic histories of oppression—there also lies the Unity beyond Difference, Internationalism, the Creole and Mulatto World, Paradisiacal, the passage through Babel back to Eden, God's purpose from the start.
Are we not possessed, and is your CD's title not apt, by the multitudes we contain, not only multitudes of observant and unobservant brave martyred ancestors, not only of the hosts of spirits and demons who parade through our dreams and nightmares, but of all the cultures through which we have wandered, which we helped to shape, in which we are at home and never at home?
Hebrew- and Yiddish-illiterate, I barely know how to pray; riddled with ambivalence, child of Marx, Freud, Mahler, Benjamin, Kafka, Goldman, Luxemburg, Trotsky, An-ski, Schoenberg, mongrel product of Judaism's and of Jewish exteriority, of its ghetto-hungry curiosity, of its assimilationist genius, I now approach Judaism as Jews once approached the splendid strangeness of the Goyishe Velt: I am shall we say deeply confused, but not complacent. And this I think of course is profoundly Jewish. So perhaps I can write your liner notes after all.
For this, he shouldn't receive an honorary degree? I am even more puzzled when I read that the commencement speech will be delivered by a prince of the royal house of Jordan, whom no one seems to be protesting—and the point is not that they should start, but that if people are to criticize the university for its endorsement of an insufficiently Jewish playwright, it seems a little inconsistent tacitly to approve of its endorsement of an Arabic royal. Because, after all, doesn't it all come down to Us and Them . . .
I'm sarcastic because I genuinely do not understand, and I've arrived late to this controversy in any case. But I seem to remember also that Brandeis is a secular school (whose academic calendar revolves around the Jewish ritual year), and that writers are awarded honorary degrees for their art, not their politics (which are perhaps simultaneous for Tony Kushner), and that the American Jewish community is not monolithic (and nevertheless causes me to feel like an alien in its mainstream), and I have not expressed myself on this matter anywhere near as eloquently as I think the situation deserves. Or perhaps it doesn't deserve much more than my desire that Tony Kushner receive his honorary degree without further ruckus, and that this whole silliness cease and desist as promptly as possible. Israel isn't Judaism. Tony Kushner isn't the Anti-Moshiach.*** And I think we all have better issues to argue over.
(For example, if my bathroom walls suffer from tzara'at, do I still need to call in a priest or just sue my landlords? Discuss. I'm not losing my shower curtain again.)
At the very least, I do.
*I don't remember its provenance; I assume I encountered it first in Leo Rosten's fabulous Dictionary of Yiddish. The general gist is argumentativeness: one synagogue for one, another for the other, and then the third that both of them can agree never to set foot in. My grandfather points out that the joke isn't about two Jews, two synagogues, and a church, but still.
**Which I notice has recently gained, on amazon.com, a viciously anti-Kushner "review" that says nothing about the music and everything about the reviewer's narrow-minded paranoia. At least the other one-star review has the grace to dislike only the album.
***Look, you find a better equivalent for the expression "isn't the Antichrist." I'm not as familiar with Jewish apocalyptica as I should be.
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The U.S. also got kicked off the Human Rights Commission and replaced with Sudan, which still practices race-based slavery. We certainly have plenty of our own failings, but I feel pretty safe saying there's a substantive difference. It tends to support my sense that there's a lot more politicking going on on those levels than actual interest in anybody's rights. (This is not to say that there aren't arms of the UN that do great things -- but not necessarily in that sphere.)
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Israel and the U.S. withdrew, and Kofi Annan compared the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazi treatment of the Jews, at which point the foreign minister of Germany told him that they weren't the same at all and he shouldn't dare make the comparison. The U.S. also got kicked off the Human Rights Commission and replaced with Sudan, which still practices race-based slavery.
Oh, international politics. You would be hilarious if you were not so scary.
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...get that idea from your post that is...
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I took
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I have a research topic. I'll post what I find and let you know when it's ready,because you've raised some issues that deserve some answers - ones I am (demonstrably) not prepared to give right now.
There is plenty to be worried about with the UN.
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a) The US and UN do not agree on Human Rights issues
b) The UN *given instance that is admittedly a little hard to fathom or defend* is not always right.
c) Ergo, the US is always right
That sort of thing. I don't think that was the argument that fleurdelis was making, just that I get nervous anytime I see a line of argument that someone could take that way.
Granted I labor under a strong predjudice of d) The US is always wrong which often gets in the way of these sort of things...
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When the UN doesn't seem to be able to differentiate the US from Sudan, what that tells me is not that the UN is wrong because it disagrees with the US, but that the UN is wrong because it is clearly not actually thinking about the human rights angle at all. I'd be quite happy if the UN genuinely went around and criticized everyone in turn and objectively, including the US. In fact, I'd be extremely happy, because there really ought to be a group that can be trusted to do that, and I would love to see that group be the UN. I'm just not convinced that it currently is.
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or for that matter China or Russia.
China is a subject on which I know a thing or two, and I've definitely got to agree there; the Ui Gur and Ui Zu (I'm not sure if that's the proper spelling; first group are the muslims living in Xinjiang "Autonomous Region" [as autonomous as Tibet] and the second are muslims living in various parts of northwest and north China) would definitely agree. The Fa Lun Gong (for whom the current rumor is, the government has built concentration camps) would as well. To say nothing of Tibet.
It's the level to which we are coming to resemble these countries, however far we may have yet to go, that upsets me most.