Saturday, Feb 18. It’s the opening event of Jewish Book Week 2012, and Simon Schama, Linda Grant and Eva Hoffman are sitting onstage, but I’m not looking at them: I’m gazing in mild disbelief at outgoing JBW director Geraldine D’Amico, who has just introduced chair Emily Maitlis as ‘the glamorous face of TV news’. The title of the evening is ‘60 Years On’. I don’t think it’s meant to be ironic.

The years in question span the trajectory of JBW since its inception in 1952. These nine days of events are a celebration of ongoing survival — although how that makes these nights different from all other Jewish festival nights is a question worth asking. There is more here — much more — than the Holocaust and the fate of Israel. Cookery writer and food anthropologist Claudia Roden will talk eloquently about the Sephardi conversos, eating pork to deflect the Spanish Inquisition. The indefatigable 87-year- old filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah, will discuss his time in the French Resistance (and make mincemeat, pork or kosher, of interviewer Alan Yentob. Why does this please me so? Because any man who talks about Lanzmann and Jean-Paul Sartre ‘sharing’ the author of The Second Sex deserves to become dinner). Lawyer Anthony Julius and Deborah Lipstadt will discuss both her new book on the Eichmann trial and their joint overcoming, in court, of David Irving’s Holocaust denial. We have a rich history, we Jews. We have survived a LOT. But the question that bubbles to the surface again and again, as I shuttle between talks on books, discussions of books, readings and signings and Willow Winston’s book-covered art installation in the King’s Place lobby, is this: do we have to talk about survival all the time?

Gradually, through the week, this question gets larger and larger, like a mushroom cloud. By the time Fabrice Humbert, author of the novel The Origins of Violence, stands up and proclaims that he, as two generations removed from the Holocaust (his grandfather was a survivor), is “free, and I can speak”, it has bloomed into something huge: an investigation of what we can and can’t talk about, as Jews.

Actually, this started early, with Maitlis. For some reason, JBW chairs like to collect a bunch of questions, thus straining all the intellectual powers of authors already on the spot, who must then remember back to the first question as well as think up answers. Maitlis, that first night, used this method to ignore any question that was anti-Israel. The silence was deafening, especially since Linda Grant had just been discussing the topics, including local anti-Semitic riots in 1947, four years before she was born, that were taboo in her childhood home in Liverpool (‘this shtetl on the Mersey’), and Eva Hoffman had talked of her girlhood in Krakow, just after the war, in which Auschwitz — 45 minutes’ drive away — was never mentioned (‘experiences so traumatic it was difficult to narrativise them’). It was intensely odd to watch these guests obediently respond only to the questions they were bidden by Maitlis to answer. I like to think of Jews, particularly secular Jews, as turbulent and argumentative, willing to air any subject that smells like a good debate. And JBW is not, by any means, a narrowly pro-Israel festival — in fact last year, commentators had conniptions over a talk starring Johann Hari and Gideon Levy, both notoriously down on Israel, and sponsored by the even more hostile London Review of Books. Yet, as the 2012 festival progressed, it became clear that a people who start with the taboo of pronouncing God’s name have a fair few other words they prefer not to mention. And this in a liberal society where a man like Irving can be legally lambasted for saying the unspeakable. Grant talks of meaningful silences (“I’m British but also an outsider. I couldn’t write about the English experience…”), but Maitlis continues to ignore questions about the predicament of Palestinians and it seems significant that none of this talkative panel says a thing about it.

That is left to the Israeli anthropologist David Wesley, next day, in a talk on ‘Jews and Palestinians in Israel’. Wesley believes that geostrategic planning motivated by “the fear or threat of Arab takeover” has engendered many of Israel’s current problems. In other words, he is voicing one of the most contentious opinions available: it is all our own fault. Treat people as the enemy, he says, and that is what they will become: a view that chimes eerily with the trajectory of Umberto Eco’s latest historical novel, The Prague Cemetery, in which Simonini, a virulent anti-Semite, devotes his entire existence to discrediting the Jews, thus ensuring that world Jewry eats his life. Wesley, too, talks about the unsayable (it is, apparently, forbidden to discuss the Arab version of 1948 in Israeli schools) as well as saying the unthinkable: that Israel, if it carries on as it is, will close in on itself entirely: “we Jews in Israel are imprisoned in a ghetto of our own making,” he protests. As he talks of suspicion, isolation and paranoia, the ghost of Simonini (a fiction, but not much of one, and the grandson of a real18th-century anti-Semite) gives a hollow cackle in my imagination.

What should the sexagenarian JBW talk about, and are there subjects on which its speakers should stay silent? Lipstadt discusses the reasons for returning, 50 years on, to the Eichmann trial: in part because a trial is, precisely, a chance to bring horror into the discourse, and by doing so, dissipate it, and in part because, as she points out in one of the best talks I went to, this was the first war-crime trial where witnesses’ testimony was given airspace. So there is an argument for bearing witness, and for continuing to unpick how that should be done and what the resulting benefits might be. What about negative talk, though? What about the potentially damaging gossip of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as recounted by their friend Lanzmann, who is arguably gossiping about the gossipers? What about the forgeries of a Simonini, which are malign fiction claiming to be fact? We all have our theories on when those we disagree with should shut up: what about our disputatious selves?

One of the reasons this is such an issue at JBW is because of the heavy bias towards non- fiction. As Grant points out, Jews are a people who have been continually on the move, who locate themselves in time rather than space, and for whom, therefore, stories about movement have an uncommon significance.

Immigrants tell natives what they want to hear. People without a country live by the book. They also, as D’Amico — a first-generation Frenchwoman — points out, say ‘they’ not ‘we’ of the incumbents, and surely this is part of the foundation of Israel’s problems: a wish to say ‘we’. Grant talks of the silences and myths in her childhood: there are two versions of how Ginsburg became anglicised to Grant, and she is not sure she believes either of them. I can match this, as I discovered accidentally, over a decade after his death, that my beloved Grandpa Jack wasn’t Jack at all, but Isaac (or presumably, Yitzhak). Grant says these uncertainties give her a sense of ‘standing on sand’: ironic, surely, for those who lay claim to a desert-fringed corner of the Middle East. Her answer, often, is to write fiction. The truth is out there, but sometimes it is easier to catch it unawares. Howard Jacobson, in a raucously entertaining defense of Ulysses as the 20th century’s great Jewish novel (aided and abetted by actors Henry Goodman and Derbhle Crotty), remarks that “if history is written by the winners, literature is written by the losers”. That is funny but, unlike good fiction, it’s not necessarily true. (Or there would be no great 19th-century British novels.) Is it the lies that have been told against the Jews, the terrible truths we have had to face or the defeat of language by horror that make the organisers of an event like this lean so towards the factual? Even authors sometimes seem constrained by the invocation to remember, which is also, of course, an invocation to tell the truth. Perhaps that is why a successful novelist like Jonathan Safran Foer decided to head straight for the knottiest tangle of Jewish narrative and repurpose the Hagaddah. The Torah — the cause of all the trouble, really, when you think about it — is a complicated mixture of historical fact and zany extrapolation; according to Umberto Eco’s definition (“people need an explanation for random events”), it probably counts as an extended conspiracy theory. Now, there’s a talk I’d like to see on the agenda for JBW 2013: the Bible as plot. Eco could argue that it’s all an anti-Semitic forgery, designed to fry the Jews in various hotnesses of hell for millennia; a frummer of your choice could maintain that every word is true. A couple of political types, one left-leaning, one right, could weigh in with the ways in which the survival of the state of Israel is/is not* dependent on preserving our Biblical heritage (*delete according to preference) and Daniel Barenboim plus orchestra could be dragooned to start playing just in time to prevent the speakers beginning to thump each other with their respective books. Doesn’t that sound fun? While we’re at it, I’d like a talk, please, by Jewish women (glamorous faces optional) about feminism and misogyny on both sides of the religious divide, which would end not with questions but with a public darts game in which a photo of Alan Yentob will stand in as the bullseye.

I am joking, or rather inventing: creativity, as any reader knows, is not the prerogative of deities, although I’m prepared to admit that She may be better at it than I. But I would like to see this elderly festival limber up. Discussions of the Holocaust and debates about Israel are important, but they, too, can move with the times: just ask Deborah Lipstadt or David Wesley. And surely one of the ways in which they should do so is to show a bit more chutzpah. Lipstadt was effectively arguing against the notion that we should all shut up about the Holocaust; Lanzmann methodically blew to pieces the romantic ideals of wartime bravery (“I was always frightened”) and noble suffering: he had no tradition of Judaism to defend, he said, because his post-pogrom parents didn’t tell him anything about his heritage. If Yentob had left time for more than one question, I would have liked to ask Lanzmann if he feels any satisfaction that Hitler’s attempt to wipe out the Jews led both to his own reconnection with his Jewish roots and, in a not dissimilar backflip, to the creation of the state of Israel. But here I am talking about the Holocaust and Israel again. I blame JBW. Is that allowed?

The invocation to remember is important; as William Faulkner said, the past is never dead; it’s not even past. But as Schama pointed out at the very beginning of JBW, it doesn’t just apply to the Holocaust. David Abulafia and Philip Mansel talking about Mediterranean coexistence was fascinating because it wandered far back into history, where the Portugese Jews faced the cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition on one side and specially benign treatment from the economically savvy Grand Duke of Tuscany on the other, and much farther around the Mediterranean than Israel. Similarly, Claudia Roden, who has just written a huge tome The Food of Spain, gave us ‘the past in a saucepan’, and utterly delicious it was, too. These, and the Ulysses event, were serious yet playful, rigorous but also broad-minded. They permitted ideas to circulate and in so doing, followed that invocation to remember into the farthest reaches of the Jewish past, where the Mishnah was created by a bunch of clever Jews arguing about the Torah, and the Gemara by a clutch of their descendants arguing about the Mishnah. If we do not talk we are nothing. If we fence in talk, limit it to permitted subjects, we are ghosts in a ghetto of our own making. If we are really clever, really creative, if we wring everything we can out of both fact and fiction, perhaps we can quiet our ghosts and resolve our problems. I see no better solution, but if you do, I’d be happy to discuss the matter.

Nina Caplan is drinks critic of The New Statesman and editor of Metropolitan, the Eurostar magazine. She also writes about everything that interests her — principally food and drink, the arts and travel — for publications including Time Out (where she used to be Features Editor), the Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Independent on Sunday and Condé Nast Traveller.

While a new all-star Haggadah plays it safe, others reinvent the Passover story as a call to action

“The point of a seder is to engage people; it’s just a meaningless ritual if it doesn’t engage people. Part of engaging people is asking contemporary questions, speaking in a contemporary idiom…” So far, so un-controversial — though the very blandness of this prescription alludes to one of the core anxieties of Jewish modernity. What if Judaism — with its traditional rituals and liturgy, practices and beliefs — can no longer provide a sustaining framework of ‘meaning’ for the Jewish people?

The New American Haggadah is an elegant production. Edited by Jonathan Safran Foer and featuring a new translation by fellow-novelist Nathan Englander, the text is supplemented by perpendicular themed commentaries: ‘Library’, ‘Nation’, ‘Playground’, ‘House of Study’. Each insert is a mini-essay, using the traditional text as its departure point, and many of them deserve quiet study. Designed by Oded Ezer, this haggadah pays visual homage to centuries of Hebraic manuscripts through an imaginative use of Hebrew lettering from Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Italian liturgical traditions. The visual reverence is reflected in Englander’s text and voiced in Safran Foer’s introduction: “how do you write something that will have meaning to con- temporary readers while maintaining the reverential tone of the book?”

Seder nights are psychodramas. They allow the community to re-tell its foundational myth — the Jewish journey from slavery to freedom — through an act of collective memory. The liturgical framework for that annual re-evocation and re-enactment took several centuries to evolve; but from the era of the first completed haggadah text — Saadia Gaon — in the 10th century until the 19th century, the text itself saw very few changes or additions. Illustrations might reflect a haggadah’s contemporary setting — with the ‘Four Sons’ often providing a backdrop of social commentary: the rasha (the ‘wicked’ child) might have been portrayed as a soldier in the Middle Ages and, later, as a gesticulating smoker leaning away from the table, or in stylish hunting gear complete with riding crop and monocle. And commentaries around the text would offer additional rabbinic insights into the set liturgy and rituals. The traditional haggadah text offered a yearly opportunity — no, obligation — to retell the story of the Jewish people and how it came to be fused with themes of oppression and liberation. Transmitting that message of timelessness to the next generation was also woven into the mythic narrative: “And you shall tell — v’higadata — your child on that day: ‘It is because of what the Eternal One did for me when I came out of Egypt…’” (Exodus 17:8). Over generations, an anthology of songs was added to the end of the service, but only one new liturgical text was grafted into haggadot. In response to anti-Jewish persecution following the Crusades and the spread of the blood libel throughout Europe in the 12th – 13th centuries, four verses from the sacred texts of Psalms and Lamentations were woven together into a hymn of defiance and hope and inserted into the existing haggadah text: ‘Pour out Your wrath on the nations that do not acknowledge You…Pursue them, and destroy them…’. This Biblically-sanctioned cry of pain and anger howled for divine intervention; as God had brought redemption in the past, the haggadah declared, so it would be in the future. The overturning of injustice was God’s work — and waiting for it was a Jewish spiritual discipline, fine- tuned over the many centuries when Jews had no power to influence their collective fortunes. They prayed for this, generation after generation, with whatever devotion they could muster, in spite of lurking internal scepticism. The rasha embodies the longstanding Jewish antagonism towards the obligations of faith, and the burden of being bound into the collective. Yet this dissenting figure also represents an often enriching Judaic rebelliousness against the status quo.

From the 19th century onwards, new civil freedoms for Jews prompted changes in the haggadah template: traditional references to the “return to Zion” or “rejoicing in the rebuilding of Your city” were replaced with phrases such as “rejoicing in the hope for the coming of Your kingdom.” Mid-century Vilna, bastion of Orthodoxy, produced editions that omit the anguished “Pour out Your wrath” and change “this year we are slaves, next year we shall be free” to “this year we are slaves in many places, next year we shall be free as we are in this our land.” By the end of the century the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ was included within a new Reform haggadah and there was an anarchist haggadah in New York. As the 20th century began, Jewish preoccupations spilled out into the Passover text: “Mah Nishtanah, how are we worse off than Shmuel the manufacturer, from Meir the banker, from Zarah the moneylender, from Reb Turdus the Rabbi?” asks a Bundist haggadah from 1900. And Yiddish haggadot emerged, giving voice to causes like workers’ rights and reflecting an increasingly secular generation keen to throw off the old religion yet still committed to its essential message: “On this very night of freedom and pride/Sing of peace among nations, of faith deep inside/ In justice and love and courage we shine/ Lomir heyben dem bekher — raise up your cup of wine.” New York, so often the scene of a radical re-working of Jewish tradition, saw an annual Workmen’s Circle (Arbeter Ring) Third Seder that integrated music, dance and performance by Yiddish actors; in spite of material poverty, this was a celebration by immigrants of the freedoms of the New World.

Meanwhile in Palestine, ideologically moderate kibbutzim began producing their own haggadot, downplaying the text’s religious message — God is often conspicuously absent — and emphasising nationalist and seasonal elements (spring, the return to working the land, the ingathering of the Jewish people) and, as the decades went on, introducing modern Hebrew literature, poetry and secular texts. In Hashomer Hatzair’s leftist allegorised text, the traditional four cups of wine represented Jewish statehood; workers’ freedom; world peace; and blessing for the earth’s produce and the fruits of honest socialist toil. In the early years of the State (1955) the Fourth Son — the ‘child who does not know how to ask’— is portrayed as an eastern-European religious youth with kippah and peyot, the representative non-Zionist who knows nothing of the new Jewish life emerging in Eretz Yisrael.

By the second half of the 20th century Jews felt able to free the message of the haggadah from its particularistic Jewish context and make it universal: there is an eternal force in history — whether you picture it as ‘divine’, or as the divine potential within the human hand — that can move individuals, groups and peoples from states of oppression and injustice towards freedom. In 1969 the ‘Freedom Seder’ held in a black church in Washington DC on the third night of Passover (April 4th — the first anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King) used a haggadah assembled by Rabbi Arthur Waskow that interpolated texts by, amongst others, Ghandi, Thoreau, Eldridge Cleaver, Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Emanuel Ringelblum of the Warsaw Ghetto, and King himself, alongside edited excerpts and adaptations of the traditional liturgy. Waskow took to heart the haggadah’s words: “All who expand upon — go beyond — telling about the departure from Egypt, they are worthy of praise”. Capturing the spirit of the times, he produced a document of immense religious courage and creativity — see it here — that went far beyond a re-telling of the traditional story. He juxtaposed Ringelblum’s 1942 words: “Most of the populace is set on resistance. It seems to me that people will no longer go to the slaughter like lambs. They want the enemy to pay dearly for their lives. They’ll fling themselves at them with knives, staves, coal gas. They’ll permit no more blockades. They’ll not allow themselves to be seized in the street…” — with those of King: “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But the principle of non-violent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites-acquiescence and violence…Non- violence can reach men where the law cannot touch them. So we will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will not hate you, but we cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws. And in winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process.” Violence or non-violence? Which way was it to be, when the hour for the liberation of the oppressed was again at hand? “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God! who hast confronted us with the necessity of choice and of creating our own book of thy Law. How many and how hard are the choices and the tasks the Almighty has set before us!” The Freedom Haggadah went through several incarnations in the decades that followed as its new-old liturgy and radical rhetoric acted as a model for, and a stimulus to, an explosion of Jewish religious creativity in America.

‘Let my people go’ still rings with the hope that oppression can be overturned and that a transformative power will bring justice

Once Waskow had universalised the central text of the haggadah — “It therefore is incumbent on every person in every generation, not merely every Jew, but every man and woman, to look upon himself as if he had actually gone forth from Egypt…” — it became possible for Jews to use the haggadah and the seder rituals as a template for other causes (ethical, moral, political) where themes of slavery and freedom, oppression and liberation, were involved. Discarding the traditional Four Questions, the San Diego Women’s Haggadah (1979/1986) asks four new questions, the first of which reads: “Mother, we ask, why is this night different from all other nights? Why do we celebrate a women’s seder?” And the answer is: “We celebrate a women’s Seder tonight so that we are free to be ourselves, not afraid that our actions will be misjudged or misinterpreted, considered bold or unwomanly.” In the same spirit, The Women’s Haggadah (1993), replaces the traditional question about bitter herbs with “Why have our mothers on this night been bitter?” It is “because they did the preparation but not the ritual. They did the serving but not the conducting. They read of their fathers but not of their mothers.” The message that the personal is political had always been woven into the tapestry of the haggadah — but new times and new situations allowed that thread to stand out more clearly. After all, the five rabbis sitting in Bnei B’rak discussing the exodus all night were, so the story goes, planning rebellion against Roman tyranny, “for when we are slaves, we must talk, but we must do more than talk” (The Rainbow Seder, 1984).

The Amazon website now offers many, many hundreds of different haggadot. The majority contain the timeworn traditional text, but the range of ‘alternative’ haggadot available — most of them published in the US where religious creativity does not have to battle against establishment conservatism — suggests a widespread dissatisfaction with the formalised liturgy that took the Jewish people from the 10th century into modernity. As well as the original civil rights-themed Waskow ‘Freedom Haggadah’ — still one of the most exciting politically- focused social action haggadot around — you can buy a Survivors’ Haggadah, a Rebirth of Israel Haggadah, an Interfaith Family Haggadah, a Haggadah for Jews and Buddhists, a Holistic Haggadah, an Animated Haggadah, a Haggadah for the Non-Observant, a Fun Family Haggadah, a Haggadah for the Vegetarian Family, a Green Haggadah, anti-war haggadot — even, if you are so inclined, a Messianic Passover Haggadah and a Passover Haggadah for Christians. Or dip into the excellent Jewdas website for a compendious range of political activism and social justice haggadot that certainly can, in Safran Foer’s words, “engage people”by “asking contemporary questions”. In these more recent texts the emphasis is upon the human power to transform; the narration of our transformative journey becomes an implicit call to action.

The symbolism of breaking the middle matza can also resonate with wider concerns: “In the world today there are many who are so pressed-down that they have not even this bread of oppression to eat. We remember people in Iraq, in Palestine, at home and all over the world where the U.S. government, multinational corporations, the world bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have caused poverty and starvation. There are so many who are hungry that they cannot come and eat with us tonight. Therefore we say to them, we set aside this bread as a token that we owe you righteousness, tzedakah, and that we will fulfil it. (Set aside a piece of matzah).” (from Love and Justice in Times of War Haggadah, 2003).

Many of these haggadot recognise that the Jewish story of liberation has the power to inspire; “Let my people go” still rings with the hope that oppression can be overturned and that a transformative power will bring justice. But ‘liberation’ is never genteel. Many of these newer texts have a wild, unruly, polemical edge — yet they all engage with the underlying ethos of Passover as the festival of freedom.

The core liturgical texts and rituals often remain — a testimony to the enduring potency of the slavery/ freedom archetype in the Jewish psyche and how it is rooted in the language of tradition. But the additions and substitutions priotise subjective concerns over reverence towards tradition. Whether this profusion of radical re- workings is symptomatic of a Judaic culture in disarray, or represents a post-Shoah renaissance of Jewish creativity akin to the Talmudic re-invention of Judaism after the destruction of the Temple, remains to be seen.

What happens to Jewish identity if its traditional religious basis no longer speaks in a language we can accept?

What we can say is that the fissiparous nature of modern Jewish identity has led to this explosion of available Passover liturgies. They are a response to the questions behind the questions of the editors of The New American Haggadah: What happens to Jewish identity if its traditional religious basis no longer speaks in a language we can accept? What happens when people reject the idea of a divine Being that intervenes to save people from oppression? What happens when one recognises that the tradition has cast upon us the mantle of responsibility for bringing heavenly ideals of freedom and justice down to earth and into our own hands to enact?’

New rituals are constantly added to the Seder itself. In the early 1980s Professor Susannah Heschel placed an orange on the seder plate. It symbolised, she said, ‘the fruitfulness of all Jews when lesbian and gay men are contributing and active members of Jewish life. In addition, each orange segment had a few seeds that had to be spat out — a gesture of…repudiating the homophobia of Judaism.’ In recent years some Jews have begun to put a bowl of olives on the seder plate to symbolise awareness that Palestinian olive-groves are being uprooted or occupied in our name: “In the lands of Israel and Palestine, olive groves provide…security. When olive groves are destroyed, the past and future is destroyed. Without economic security, a people can much more easily be conquered, or enslaved. And so this year, we eat an olive, to make real our understanding of what it means each time a bulldozer plows up a grove. Without the taste of olives, there will be no taste of freedom. Keep one olive on the Seder plate, and pass out olives.” (Love and Justice in Times of War Haggadah).

But rituals old and new, and haggadot traditional or contemporary, are only a beginning. Beyond doorways into memory and the mythic underpinnings of Judaism and our sense of peoplehood, they are not only about a Jewish journey from ‘slavery’ to ‘freedom’. They are — as they always have been — an invitation to action: to take the words on the page, the motifs of the tradition, and translate them into a commitment to live out the blessings and radical vision of our heritage.

Is The New American Haggadah a spur to action? It is a decidedly literary creation. (Though what is it with the need to define a diaspora haggadah in relation to nationhood? Something called The New British Haggadah would never see the light of day.) No, this luxurious edition represents another stage in the symbiotic relationship between Jews and America. Two of America’s leading young Jewish novelists have combined to create a comforting text almost completely apolitical and unchallenging of the status quo. At the respective ages of Foer and Englander, two of their Jewish American predecessors were finishing Portnoy’s Complaint and publishing The Armies of the Night , the ‘history as a novel/ novel as history’ account of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon. Pity we never got to see a Roth/Mailer haggadah — but what makes me think that if we had, we might have found in it more than a single glancing reference to the greatest Jewish ethical challenge of our times, the plight of the Palestinians?

Rabbi Howard Cooper is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice, the Director of Spiritual Development at Finchley Reform Synagogue, and an author. His latest book is The Alphabet of Paradise: An A-Z of Spirituality for Everyday Life and he blogs at www.howardcoopersblog.blogspot.com.

Last year saw a new front opened up in what has been described as Israel’s democratic recession. This time, it was the country’s proliferation of left-leaning non- governmental organisations that came under attack from legislation that would see such non-profits sharply curbed by limits placed on their foreign funding. Amid proposed bills that would limit the independence of the Supreme Court, ban calls to boycott goods produced in Israel or the settlements and penalise those who taught that Israel’s birth in 1948 was a ‘nakba’ or catastrophe, the danger to dovish non-profits came as a new blow to what remained of the Israeli left. Some of those particularly targeted for criticism included the New Israel Fund, B’tselem, Adalah, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. The willingness of governments — mainly in Europe and northern America — to assist and grant funding to such Israeli organisations dedicated to human rights, civil society and a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has given the right another opportunity to accuse these groups of disloyalty to the state. It has also opened up fresh ways to legislate against the funding of left-wing NGOs. The original proposals to limit NGO backing have somewhat run aground amidst the controversy, but fresh ones have been put forward in their wake. These new bills would prevent governments from donating to NGOs that support, for example, Israeli officials in international courts or encourage refusal to serve in the army, while other foreign donations to NGOs would be taxed at 45% unless the non-profit was already part-funded by the government or exempted by the finance ministry.

It seems curious that NGOs have become such a sensitive issue when it could well be argued that the very foundations of the state of Israel rest upon their existence. In the nascent stages of Zionism, community-organised services went a long way to founding institutions responsible for creating the fabric of the new Jewish society. Most were financed by Jews from abroad. One of the oldest, now known as Yad-Hanadiv, was set up by the Rothschild family for settlement and industry in Palestine and amongst its other achievements can claim credit for helping to build the Knesset and Supreme Court. British Jewish philanthropist Moses Montefiore was another proponent of this drive, among other things financing some of the first neighbourhoods to be built outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. But these were not just organisations run by rich foreign donors; many communities throughout Europe had a communal trust which financed Jews living in Palestine, not all Zionist. The ultra-Orthodox financed yeshivas and the livelihoods of their students in Jerusalem, Safed and Hebron, and their funders helped build many neighbourhoods in these cities.

From the 1920s, the Zionist movement developed a semi-governmental framework handled by
what today could be described as NGOs

Jews have always given money to fund social causes, and both the Zionist and non-Zionist communities in pre-state Palestine were very much dependent on money coming from abroad, to kick-start new communities, develop agriculture and sustain new immigrants. From the 1920s, as the Zionist movement began to consolidate itself, a semi-governmental framework began to develop, handled by what today could be described as NGOs. These institutions served as a parallel Jewish administration set apart from that run by the British Mandate. It became known as “ha-medina she’baderech” — the state on the way. The Kupat Cholim health service, for instance, was founded in 1911 by the union of agricultural workers in Yehuda, near Petach Tikva, with the idea of providing medical insurance and treatment to workers. In the late 1930s, it became a division of the Histadrut, the workers union, and by the 1940s they had established whole hospitals. Similar organisations supplied other social needs and financed the building of civilian infrastructure, planting of forests, school networks, vocational training colleges and the new Jewish universities. The British Mandate government was nominally in charge of supplying services to the local population but the Jewish community was eager to set up its own system. While some of the finance was from special taxes and fees paid by the local Jewish users, these institutions were, to a great degree, subsidised by the largesse of Jewish philanthropists from around the world, not all of them rich — many middle-class and even poor Jewish families contributed to the building of the Promised Land.

‘When the state was established, with strong socialist values, its ideological position was that a strong central government should provide services’

This trend began to change after 1948.“When the state was established, with strong socialist values, its ideological position was that a strong central government should provide services,” says Rachel Liel, the head of the New Israel Fund. Most of the functions of the Jewish Agency — which until the creation of Israel had functioned as the de facto government — were absorbed into the state, apart from aliyah and foreign fundraising. Health was channelled through the government — with the Histadrut continuing its central role as a virtual part of the government, as both were run by the Mapai party until 1977 when the sweeping victory of the Likud heralded a change in the state’s ideological framework. A number of social, financial and political developments from this period onwards changed the basic framework of Israel’s social services sector, not least the breakup of much of the financial holdings of the Histadrut which either went bankrupt or were sold off, as well as an increasing trend of privatisation and greater affluence in the economy.

This expansion is not a uniquely Israeli phenomenon, and can be seen in various forms throughout the world, as Benjamin Gidron explains in a paper for the Israel Democracy Institute entitled ‘The Israeli Third Sector: Patterns of Activity and Growth, 1980–2007’. “Globalisation processes and privatisation of public services, the weakening of governments and increased awareness on the part of certain groups and populations regarding the potential benefits of self-organising — all contribute to the third sector’s growth,” he writes. “These factors have transformed that sector into an important factor in the economy, society, and polity.” But this seems to have been taken to somewhat of an extreme in Israeli society, which now has one of the highest numbers of registered non-profit organisations in the Western world. “Slowly but surely services were delivered by the private rather than the public sector,” says Liel. “Most social services are no longer provided by the government but by a service sector. A very major part of the third sector in Israel are services — for elderly, housing, disabilities — which have contracts with the government who provide them with policy guidance, supervision and funds.” According to the latest figures available from the Ben Gurion University of the Negev Israeli Centre for Third Sector Research, there are currently over 40,000 registered third sector organisations in Israel, although only about a third of these are active. An average of 1,500 new organisations register annually, and this sector constitutes roughly 13% of the country’s GDP. According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, total donations to NGOs in 2010 were estimated at 16.2 billion NIS, with about two-thirds estimated to come from foreign sources.

The NGO sector in Israel has been profoundly affected by the growing influence of ultra-Orthodox parties within the ruling coalitions. While the Haredi education networks have remained largely independent of government control, the ultra-Orthodox parties have demanded and received government funding for their schools, girls’ seminaries and yeshivas. The government grants for these are channeled through non-profit NGOs. As a result, 26% of the NGOs in Israel are dedicated to religious aims, with thousands of small operations attached to synagogues and schools, and major ones including El Ha-Maayan, the main NGO run by the Shas political party, and Tzeirei Chabad, the central NGO supporting Chabad-Lubavitch operations in Israel. 16% deal with health and social affairs, another 16% are concerned with culture and entertainment, 15% finance education and research, 12% deal with general philanthropy and the rest are dedicated to social change and development.

In many cases, it has proven easier for the government simply to hand over funding rather than work at incorporating Israel’s diverse groups

Another reason for the proliferation of NGOs in Israel is the country’s babel-like cultural diversity. Orthodox Zionist philosophy championed the melting pot but the state has had to confront the desire of various groups to retain their own particular character as well as control over their internal affairs. In many cases, it has proven easier for the government simply to hand over funding rather than work at incorporating these groups. Establishing specific NGOs ensures that special interests are taken into account. These NGOs can function like pressure or interest groups but beyond special interest groups there are also NGOs for non-minority causes such as feminism.

Women’s social change organisations, such as the veteran Israel Women’s Network lobby group and Kolech which fights for women’s rights within the religious community have made important contributions towards creating change in gender issues, especially at a time when many note a hardening of positions towards women. A right-wing government containing ultra-Orthodox parties seems unwilling to oppose an apparent trend to exclude them from public life, with attempts to segregate public buses and limit women from participating in civic and military forums.

As the Israel Women’s Network’s founder, the feminist campaigner Alice Shalvi told the Jerusalem Post, female leadership faced a particular challenge “in this male chauvinist society, in which military considerations are such a determining factor in what happens. This patriarchal and paternalistic attitude stems not only from our security situation, but also from Judaism, which is a patriarchal religion”.

The strong female presence across the NGO sector can be seen as a response to the more macho excesses of a militarised society. Many of the women’s NGOs have eschewed a hierarchical structure in favour of a collective approach.This is especially notable in groups like Machsom Watch, a movement of Israeli women, who, since 2001, have conducted daily observations of IDF checkpoints in the West Bank and along the separation fence, as well as monitoring events in the offices of the Civil Administration and in military courts. Also operating as a collective is Who Profits? a research project investigating the commercial involvement of Israeli and foreign companies with the occupation and initiated by the Coalition of Women for Peace.

Valeria Seigelshifer, who now works for the Women’s Forum For a Fair Budget, has been employed in the NGO sector since 2003. In nearly 10 years, she says, “all my bosses were women. Maybe they are more willing to listen to their employees, to other views and to share and take decisions in a more inclusive way. Opinions are taken into account; maybe it’s more democratic.” The NIF’s Liel agrees. “My feeling, cautiously, is that the NGO sector in Israel is more dominated by women employees and directors,” she says. “There is more conversation and dialogue, rather than power imposed, and more mentoring and sharing rather than hierarchy.”

‘Previously, this political left would usually take the blows, now the NGOs take the fire’

The other phenomenon in the Israeli third sector, as so acutely highlighted by last year’s attempted legislation, has been the rise of NGOs campaigning for human rights in recent years, such as Breaking the Silence, which records the testimonies of former IDF soldiers, and Yesh Din, documenting abuses in the occupied territories. This rise may be ascribed to the decline of the political left in the country, which battered by the second intifada and a general turn rightwards within society, has shrunk to near-negligible proportions. The current Knesset has just eight members of the Labour party, five members of its breakaway party Ha’atzmaut, and only three representatives from Meretz. Without a substantial opposition to reign in the excesses of the current administration, it has fallen to NGOs to raise critical voices and challenge.

“What’s unique about our situation in Israel is that human rights NGOs are being targeted as scapegoats because the political left are so weak,” says Roy Yellin, a political consultant working with many human rights organisations. “Previously, this political left would usually take the blows, but since they don’t have enough representation in the Knesset, now the NGOs take the fire.”

“In Israel major areas of concern in human rights — the occupation and Palestinian citizens of Israel, for instance — are perceived as working against the interests of the state

Another aspect particular to the Israeli situation, he adds, is directed by the Jewish nature of the country. “In any other democratic, modern western country, if you were working to aid refugees or marginalised communities, you wouldn’t be seen as doing something against the state,” he said. “In Israel major areas of concern in human rights — the occupation and Palestinian citizens of Israel, for instance — are perceived as working against the interests of the state. This contradicts the modern concept of nationalism — for instance, that a French citizen is French no matter their religion. In Israel, if you are working for the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, you’re a traitor.”

The growth of left-wing NGOs has conversely led to a rise in oppositional non-profits. One such group — NGO Monitor — aims to uncover what it calls “the insidious motives of a range of human rights organisations”, and argues that, in terms of foreign funding, “both the amount of money given to NGOs and the quantity of these types of NGOs are not found elsewhere…there are no other cases where sovereign, democratic countries manipulate the internal political affairs and promote opposition policies in another sovereign, democratic country in this manner and to this extent,” the organisation claims.

To back up its claims, NGO Monitor published accounts sourced from the Israeli Registrar of Non- Profits, noting that groups such as Ir Amim, which campaigns over the status of Jerusalem, had received funds from the EU, the UK, Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and Switzerland amounting to NIS 2.7m in 2009, 73.9% of its total donations. In the same year, Yesh Din relied on NIS 3.12m of funding from Belgium, the EU, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK and Ireland — 72.4% of its total.

Another leading light in the counter-movement is Im Tirtzu, a neo-Zionist grouping which ran a notorious campaign featuring NIF board chair and former Meretz MK Naomi Chazan with a horn emerging from her head. The counter-movement has progressed single- mindedly towards its aim of marginalising those ‘disloyal’NGOs. “They are very effective at raising money and have better political strategists than our camp, as well as better co-ordination and better synchronising with government,” notes Yellin.

It is by no means certain whether the campaign against the NGOs will succeed. Netanyahu himself in November 2011 pulled the law which he had initially supported “for redrafting”, perhaps dismayed at the level of criticism from Jewish leaders abroad and senior politicians in friendly governments. British Foreign Secretary William Hague had said his country was “deeply concerned” by proposals to pass legislation to limit foreign funding. “This would have a serious impact on projects funded from the UK and elsewhere to support universal rights and values and would be seen as undermining the democratic principles the Israeli state is founded on,” he added. And Israel’s attorney- general Yehuda Weinstein warned he would be unable to defend proposed legislation in the High Court should it be approved by the Knesset, noting that they would deal “a harsh blow to a long list of constitutional rights, including freedom of expression, freedom of association and the right to equality”.

‘Working for the rights of women, Israeli Arabs — this isn’t anti-Israel, this is pro-Israel’

Perhaps the ferocity of the attacks are evidence of the sector’s influence — “if something is so marginal and non-influential you don’t need to outlaw it,” notes Yellin, predicting that human rights and social justice NGOs will emerge stronger from the maelstrom. But others, including Liel, see foreign funding as essential for the survival of this sector, and the sector as essential for the survival of democracy. “Working for the rights of women, Israeli Arabs — this isn’t anti-Israel, this is pro-Israel. Those trying to frame it as anti-Israel have an agenda and need to be exposed,” she said, adding, “If a lot of this funding goes, then this sector will cease to exist. I can’t be more passionate about this — a democracy without a human rights sector is no longer a democracy.”

Daniella Peled is editor at the Institute of War and Peace Reporting. A former Foreign Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, she writes widely on international affairs.

Liberal Zionism is in vogue. It underpins the thinking of groups like J-Street, Yachad, and the New Israel Fund, as well as the writings of figures like Peter Beinart and Gershom Gorenberg. They claim that liberalism and Zionism can be fused. Some even claim the two are complementary, asserting that Zionism’s socialist origins lend it a collectivist penchant for social justice and action. It is particularly popular amongst Zionists outside Israel, keen to find a brand of Jewish nationalism that matches their liberal proclivities and chimes well with their belief in the importance of equal rights. It has become prevalent lately largely as a response to the perceived anti-democratic excesses of Netanyahu and Lieberman. Rhetorically, “Liberal Zionism” appears to offer the possibility of supporting Jewish national self- determination while still holding true to the principles of liberty and equality for all.

Peter Beinart is fast becoming the pin-up boy of the Liberal Zionist movement.

Peter Beinart is fast becoming the pin-up boy of the Liberal Zionist movement. An American political scientist and journalist, his New York Review of Books essay, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” generated intense international debate when it was published in June 2010 and reached record inboxes virally. His new online group blog, the virtual ‘Zion Square,’ which was launched in March 2012 to provide a platform for “conversation” among a selected group of political thinkers and activists, explicitly states: “We believe in a two-state solution in accordance with the liberal Zionist principles articulated in Israel’s declaration of independence.” Beinart’s latest book, The Crisis of Zionism, launched at J-Street’s 2012 conference, is similarly premised on Liberal Zionist principles. Beinart believes that the original Herzlian Zionism was both a nationalist movement and a liberal one. Though he accepts that there is a tension between the two, he does not view it as any more problematic than the tension between, say, economic development and environmental protection, or government spending and fiscal discipline.

The problem, according to him, is posed by the illiberal Zionism unleashed by Israel’s territorial acquisitions during the 1967 war, and the subsequent establishment of Jewish settlements beyond the so-called ‘Green Line.’ In Beinart’s words, “to the west of that line, Israel is a flawed but genuine democracy. To the east, it is an ethnocracy. In the Israel created in 1948, inequities notwithstanding, citizenship is open to everyone. In the Israel created in 1967, by contrast, Jews are citizens of a state whose government they help elect; Palestinians are not.” Alongside this political injustice, Beinart identifies another problem: a vicious cycle, “in which the illiberal Zionism beyond the green line destroys the possibility of liberal Zionism inside it” by breeding intolerance towards both Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel. Fearful of the imminent destruction of Herzl’s democratic dream, Beinart effectively appeals to the most powerful leaders of the American Jewish establishment to recognize the urgency of the situation, and support a return to the original liberal variant of Zionism. In so doing, he holds out a tantalising opportunity to a new and bewildered generation caught between the unapologetic ultra- Zionism of the right and the disillusioned non-, anti- or post-Zionism of the left: that they can reconcile these increasingly conflicting aspects of their identities — the liberal and the Zionist — and that in seeking to square that circle they are effectively fighting “the battle every Zionist generation wages against itself.” Not surprisingly, Beinart appears to be acquiring an iconic status in some circles, especially among young Jewish liberals.

Some argue that Zionism is an exclusionary ideology that privileges one ethnic group over another

Yet there are those who question this fusion of liberalism and Zionism. Some argue that Zionism is an exclusionary ideology that privileges one ethnic group over another, and as such is inherently incompatible with liberalism, which is premised on equality. Several writers and academics share this perspective, including Oren Yiftachel, a political geographer at Ben-Gurion University, who regards the ‘Jewish and democratic state’ formula as an oxymoron akin to ‘hot ice.’ Yiftachel argues that the common scholarly and political attempts to portray the existence of ‘Israel proper’ within the ‘Green Line’ as ‘Jewish and democratic’ are both “analytically flawed and politically deceiving.” Instead, he argues that the whole entity, territorially and politically, ought to be characterised as an ethnocracy, which he defines as “a non-democratic regime which attempts to extend or preserve disproportional ethnic control over a contested multi-ethnic territory.” Yiftachel’s argument partly stems from what he regards as Israel’s history as a settler society, marked by ethno-nationalism and the ethnic logic of capital, with its resultant discriminatory land laws and planning policies.

But Yiftachel’s argument is not merely about history; he also points to the inherent conceptual incompatibility between liberalism and Zionism, which seeks to simultaneously privilege one group while guaranteeing equal citizenship for all. In this, he is supported by Nadim Rouhana, a legal scholar at Tufts University, who emphasises, “a Jewish state in theory and practice means privileging Jewish citizens over all other citizens [...] There are few honest observers in Israel who dispute that a Jewish state, by definition, privileges one group of citizens over another.” Given these internal inconsistencies, the journalist Joseph Dana wrote in the Israeli blog-based web magazine +972 that “liberal Zionism, as used today, is a dangerous and, in some profound ways, dishonest system of thought.”

Liberal Zionists come in many shapes and sizes. The UK based Labour Friends of Israel recently published a collection of essays “Making the Progressive Case for Israel” that introduced a conscious re-branding of the organisation using Liberal Zionist arguments and phrases. Lorna Fitzsimons, the former CEO of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), which is “dedicated to creating a more supportive environment for Israel in Britain,” adopted a similar approach, announcing in The Jerusalem Post, “We are launching a campaign to win back and hold the centre ground alongside many other communal organizations. We are launching the progressive case for Israel and driving the campaign for the Left to support it as a Jewish state.” The UK’s Union of Jewish Students also shifted to a liberal Zionist approach with the launch of their ‘Liberation’ campaign in September 2011.

Some liberals are genuinely struggling — or hugging and wrestling, as they themselves often describe it — with Zionism in a bid to reconcile their love for the Jewish state with their belief in social justice. Finally, there are those who doubt the coherence of Liberal Zionism, and in turn the Jewish and democratic state formula, but who nevertheless support Liberal Zionist organisations that make a valuable contribution to equal rights in Israel. For example, some supporters of the New Israel Fund may question the premise of the organisation, yet acknowledge the importance of the Fund’s investment in groups at the forefront of the struggle for civil and political rights in Israel, like the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

“At the heart of the Zionist project is the struggle to reconcile these two valid but conflicting ideals.”

Beinart accepts that the principles of Zionism and liberalism are absolutely in tension. “There will always be tension between Israel’s responsibility to the Jewish people and its responsibility to all its people, Jewish and non-Jewish alike,” he explains, “at the heart of the Zionist project is the struggle to reconcile these two valid but conflicting ideals.” At the same time, he defends the pairing, arguing that the tension between them is neither indicative of one of the values being illegitimate, nor irreconcilable. But are Beinart’s analogies, comparing the tension in liberalism and Zionism to that between economic development and environmental protection, or government spending and fiscal discipline, appropriate? Might other analogies be more appropriate, those in which the two terms are fundamentally at odds with one another, such as the contradiction between heredity and meritocracy, or evolution and creationism?

Much of this debate hinges on the definitions of “Zionism” and “liberalism.” Liberalism, like Zionism, has been through several historical incarnations, and can now be understood as incorporating many things from a loose sense of liberty or equality (themselves arguably in tension) to liberal democracy as a political system, free and fair elections, constitutionalism, and human rights. Liberalism evolved from a focus on ‘negative liberty,’ the reduction of government intervention in the lives of individuals, to incorporate ideals of ‘social liberalism,’ in which the state was obligated to protect its citizens through welfare support. Despite these various, sometimes competing, definitions, it appears that most political theorists agree that liberalism incorporates some notion of individual rights, universal equality and civil liberties.

Zionism, in most of its incarnations, is an ethno-centric political ideology

By contrast, Zionism, in most of its incarnations, is an ethno-centric political ideology committed to returning the Jews to, and sovereignty in, Eretz Yisrael. Though this may be conceived in more territorially expansive terms (Revisionist Zionism) or twinned with certain socialist economic arrangements (Labour Zionism), the underlying assumptions seem to be that Jews constitute an ancient nation, or people group; that they require self- determination to protect themselves from timeless and annihilationist anti-Semitism; and that the logical site of that self-determining entity ought to be the historic Land of Israel.

It seems that this ideology, which privileges one group on the basis of their membership in an ethnic, religious or national group, is inherently at odds with a political philosophy premised on individual rights and universal equality: a state founded by and for the Jewish people, living both within and outside of its territory, cannot also be a democratic state for all its citizens within territorial limits. It is illogical to claim that everyone is equal, yet some are more equal.

The debate about Liberal Zionism is not only about concepts. It is also about history.

But the debate about Liberal Zionism is not only about concepts. It is also about history. Ever since the founding of the State of Israel, the theoretical privileging of Jews within Zionist ideology has resulted in widely documented discrimination in the allocation of resources in Israel, especially access to land and housing, and government budget allocations. Though the socio- economic indicators suggest improvements in the lives of Israel’s Palestinian citizens (as they prefer to be identified) over time, they remain one of the poorest groups in Israel, have a lower life expectancy than Jewish citizens, and their infant mortality rate is twice as high as that of the Jewish population. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), around 50% of Israel’s Palestinian population lives in poverty, compared to around 15% for Jewish families. Palestinian citizens of Israel are vastly under-represented among university students in Israel, making up only 8.1% of all university students in 2003, less than half their share of the country’s population. The gaps between the Jewish majority and Arab minority are the result of multiple factors including large Arab families, the low participation rate of Arab women in the labour force, the overall lower skill level of the Arab workforce, and discrimination in the labour market. But discriminatory state policies and neglect by many Israeli governments have also contributed to this gap, particularly visible in the area of land planning and rural-urban development; in 1949 Jews owned 13.5% of the land. By the 1960s they had 93%. The upshot is that Arab towns and villages have a high population density, and Arab homes are overcrowded.

Perhaps the most serious discrimination has occurred in relation to population policies. Zionism was not only a nationalist movement that saw itself as a revival of an ancient people and a solution to rising levels of European anti-Semitism, but also a settler colonial project that sought to establish a Jewish nation- state in a region populated predominantly by non- Jewish Palestinians. Ironically, the goal of establishing a democratic Jewish state, with a Jewish majority, necessitated a range of population policies to ensure first the creation, and then the maintenance, of that Jewish majority. Population displacement, especially in 1948 and 1967, combined with discriminatory immigration policies, according to which Jews are effectively entitled to automatic citizenship via the Law of Return while Palestinian refugees who fled, or were driven from, their homes in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war are barred from returning. According to the sociologist Christian Joppke at Bern University, “Israel cannot be a liberal state, with a non-discriminatory immigration policy, unless it ceases to be Jewish. Its Jewishness prevents Israel from ever coming to rest within its territory, and from becoming a ‘state of all of its citizens.’” At times, there have also been unofficial discriminatory fertility policies intended to increase Jewish and decrease Palestinian fertility. The 1970 Veteran’s Benefit Law, for example, offered increased child allowances to families in which at least one member had served in the IDF.

In the UK, those who advocate discriminatory immigration policies are not regarded as “ultra-liberals.”

Liberal Zionists often share these demographic fears, pointing out that their support for the two state solution stems from their fear concerning the threat to the Jewish majority posed by retaining areas containing large numbers of Palestinians. For the same reason, many support the continuation of Israel’s selective immigration policies, in particular the Law of Return coupled with the continued barring of the ‘Right of Return’ to Palestinian refugees. The self-described “ultra-liberal Zionist” Larry Derfner says that he would “do away with all the discrimination, except in one area — immigration.” In the UK, those who advocate discriminatory immigration policies are not regarded as “ultra-liberals.” Quite the reverse, they are seen as ultra-nationalists, aligned with the British National Party (BNP) or English Defense League (EDL).

The contradiction of Liberal Zionism, in turn, has serious implications for the “two state solution,” which envisages a Jewish and democratic state alongside a Palestinian and democratic state. The analysis above suggests problems with at least half of that formula. Moreover, the ethno- national logic and exclusivist tendencies of Zionism may be mirrored on the Palestinian side; there are already worrying demands from some Palestinians for a Jew- free Palestinian state. At minimum, Jews left inside the future Palestinian state are likely to experience the same second-class status as Palestinian citizens of Israel. This would not be surprising; anti-colonialist nationalist resistance movements often come to embody the very entity they have fought so hard to throw off.

To resolve this problem one could redefine Zionism and Palestinian nationalism by removing the discriminatory ethno-national elements of both. Within a two state framework this would look as follows: The Palestinian side would be required to forgo an exclusivist conception of the state premised on ethno-national Palestinian peoplehood transcending geographical boundaries, in favour of a more inclusive legal-territorial citizenship with Palestinian symbols on the flag and national holidays. On the Israeli side, this would entail abandoning the original Herzlian notion of Jewish self-determination, and limiting the ‘Jewish’ element so that it included only symbols, like the Star of David on the flag or Jewish festivals as national holidays. Such cultural symbols, though not innocuous, would render Israel akin to the UK, which has a flag comprising crosses and national holidays that are generally Christian in origin, yet no official policy of selecting or privileging citizens according to ethno-national or ethno-religious belonging or identity.

Do the (discriminatory population policy) means justify the (Jewish majority) ends?

These changes would not, however, ensure the continuation of Israel as a Jewish majority state or safe- haven for persecuted Jews. But is that conception of a state still necessary or has it become an anachronism? Even if it were necessary, do the (discriminatory population policy) means justify the (Jewish majority) ends? In other words, is the Jewish community prepared to accept un- or anti-democratic discriminatory policies in order to maintain the Jewish state? Can anything ever justify flouting democratic norms? Finally, can anti-Semitism be truly resolved by creating a state that perpetuates ethno- national difference, and institutionalises discrimination rather than promoting inclusive citizenship?

The debate about “Liberal Zionism” is not merely a conceptual or historical debate. It is both central to potential political solutions to the conflict, and to the debate about Jewish identity and its relationship to Israel. As ‘Zion Square’ develops, I hope that its contributors live up to their promise “to put front and centre the very questions that official Jewish discourse rules out of order,” in particular questioning Liberal Zionism itself. I also hope that those Liberal Zionists hugging and wrestling with complex ideas find the will and the courage to engage honestly with these questions. This may not be easy, but will be absolutely necessary to the future wellbeing of the Jewish people and Israel.

RESPONSE BY HANNAH WEISFELD

It is true that there is a tendency among those that define themselves as Liberal Zionists to displace the tensions between Liberalism and Zionism over the green line. The territory considered by the international community and a growing number of Jews to be illegally occupied — a place where 3.5 million Palestinians live without passports, freedom of movement and the right to vote for a government that controls their land, sea and air space to mention just a few of the implications of a 45 year old occupation — is not Israel ‘proper’ and therefore ‘Liberal’ Zionists can voice heartfelt criticism. It is seen to be legitimate criticism as it is tied up with ‘love’ for Israel and concern for its long-term safety and security. The conversation is on much tougher terrain when it comes to dealing with that considered to be ‘legal’ Israel — the territory within the 1949 armistice lines — as it calls into question the Jewish national project in its entirety.

The early Zionists comprised an eclectic mix of visionaries, each believing a nation state for the Jewish people would revive Judaism and the Jewish people in a way that continual dispersal in the diaspora could not. Herzl in particular was driven by the notion that without self determination — in the form of a political entity that could defend itself — the Jews would forever face the threat of annihilation. One could argue that Israel’s premier, Netanyahu, sees himself as a the baton carrier for the political Zionism of Herzl . In his latest interaction with Obama in the White House, in which the threat of a nuclear Iran dominated the conversation, he made clear that “…after all, that’s the very purpose of the Jewish state, to restore to the Jewish people control over our destiny.”

However, while anti-Semitism and pogroms served as one historical backdrop, it was by no means the sole motivating factor for many of these idealists. There were those who believed that Israel did not actually need to be a political entity, rather an opportunity for Jews to build a physical connection to the land, others who believed that the Jewish people would create a truly equal society if they refused to exploit local Palestinian labourers through a class based system, and others who, driven by God, were part of a different discourse entirely: the fulfilment of religious obligation. Underpinning these diverse beliefs was the 20th century discourse of nationalism. Amos Oz describes the modern state of Israel in relation to its early Zionist thinkers as a collection of dreams: ‘dreams can only remain wonderful as long as they don’t come true. But the real Israel is not one dream come true, but a conglomeration of dreams, fantasies, blueprints and master plan’. For many Jews, the dream being played out today is one that does not reflect the core Jewish values of equality and justice. Within the diaspora, and in fact among Jewish and non-Jewish communities alike, the actions of the Israeli government have become synonymous with the state of Israel which, in turn, represents the embodiment of the Zionist dream.

Zionism itself has come to be associated with an ongoing occupation and increasingly anti-democratic legislation

So Zionism itself has come to be associated with an ongoing occupation and increasingly anti-democratic legislation that seeks to marginalise dissenting voices within Israel, along with minority communities. It is for this reason that the widely acclaimed ‘Beinart theory’ of young Jews ‘checking’ their Zionism at the door of liberalism is playing out. It is not surprising, Zionism having been redacted so significantly, that there is a powerful drive within diaspora communities to reinvent a ‘brand’ of Zionism that can engage a new generation of Jews.

Organisations such as J Street in the USA and Yachad in the UK assert that the most urgent task of this generation of Zionists is to end the occupation and safeguard Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. As this can only be achieved by removing the ‘demographic’ threat of 3.5 million Palestinians, who most people believe, cannot and should not be indefinitely occupied, the choice must be either to give them the vote or give them their own state. So does this mean that Liberal Zionism fails to deal with the tensions existing within the green line, and is, therefore, an intellectually dishonest exercise in protecting what is, at its core, a rotten concept — a nationalist dream that will forever need to privilege one group over another? Is the very discourse of viewing a minority population as a ‘demographic threat’ entirely illiberal?

At the first Zionist Congress held on August 29th 1897 Herzl famously said ‘“In Basle I founded the Jewish state . . . Maybe in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will realise it.’ On November 29th 1947, three months short of exactly fifty years, the United Nations voted into existence the Jewish state. The sense of urgency and visionary leadership which drove the Zionist movement in 1897 is today required by the Liberal Zionist movement of 2012.

The Liberal Zionism of the 21st century must continue to recognise the urgency of ending the Occupation

Liberal Zionism must not only to give legitimacy back to an ideology which was once considered to be core to our national self determination, but build a new narrative that will take the Jewish national project in the 21st century. The Liberal Zionism of the 21st century must continue to recognise the urgency of ending the Occupation, not least because of the grave threat it poses to the viability of a Jewish state. At the same time it must articulate a civic narrative for all the citizens of Israel, including the 20% that are not Jewish. This narrative will contain multiple, and sometimes conflicting versions of history, and accept that those holding the literal (or metaphorical) key to a home no longer theirs, form part of the story of contemporary Israel. Liberal Zionism will revisit the discussions of the early Zionists and understand that what was, for some, an attempt to build a Marxist utopia, resulted for others in displacement and economic hardship. The Israel of the new Liberal Zionist may not look like that of the old Zionists. Some of the symbols of statehood, and certain state institutions and mechanisms created during the years when the Jewish people were fighting a war of survival, may no longer be deemed fit for purpose. This is not a rejection of rotten ideology, it is modernisation.

While modernising, Liberal Zionism retains at its core the narrative of the Jewish people: the longing to return, the desire to have a place where Jewish people can feel safe both physically and psychologically, and a place where the revival of the Hebrew language and culture can provide sustenance to Jewish culture and tradition world-wide. This is the legitimate dream of successive generations and any national manifestation must, in part, be a reflection of the dreams of the people.

The Israel of the new Liberal Zionist may not look like that of the old Zionists

The task of defusing the tension within the term ‘Liberal Zionism’ has barely begun. Those already on task in Israel need the support of their fellow Jews abroad — Zionism was always a co-creation between the diaspora and Jews of Israel. Rather than dismissing the task as too great, or irreconcilable before it has even been tried, we can both hold onto the dream and bring it into a new world that looks and feels quite different from the original world into which it was born.

Rebecca Steinfeld is a Visiting Lecturer and Teaching Fellow in the history and politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict at the University of Birmingham. She received her doctorate in politics from St Antony’s College, University of Oxford.

Hannah Weisfeld is the director, and one of the founders of the pro-Israel pro-peace movement Yachad. Prior to this, she was involved in managing campaigns on a wide range of social issues including the conflict in Darfur and climate change.

Peering from behind bars, his hair shorn to prison regulation length, Mikhail Khodorkovsky maintains a quiet dignity. Once the richest man in Russia and head of the giant Yukos oil conglomerate, he has become a cause célèbre as Russia’s most famous political prisoner and an increasingly irritating thorn in the side of the Putin administration. His case highlights Russia’s ingrained authoritarianism, an image Putin has been at pains to challenge, as well as drawing attention to the uncomfortable phenomenon of the Jewish oligarch. More widely it invites consideration of the position of Jews in post-communist Russia and why it is that so many of them left.

Among the many restrictions to be lifted along with the iron curtain were the two great taboos: money and religion. At the same moment that ordinary Russians found themselves able, even encouraged, to make money and build private enterprise, they were also allowed to express the ethnicities and religions they had suppressed under 72 years of communism. Many Jews took advantage of the new freedom to emigrate — up to 1.3 million left for Israel — while those who stayed were able to benefit from the radical domestic reforms and, possibly, to play a part in helping shape the future state. Khodorkovsky himself studied chemistry, following in the footsteps of his Jewish father and Christian mother. Together with his right-hand man, Leonid Nevzlin, fully Jewish and currently in exile in Israel, in 1987 ‘Misha’ Khodorkovsky founded Menatep, Russia’s first private investment bank, with the approval of Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalising Kremlin. At the time he was a middle-level chemist and a former member of Komsomol, the Communist Party youth wing. Before the Menatep years, he had already shown entrepreneurial nous by setting up a firm to import badly needed computers from abroad. In 1991 he used Menatep proceeds to gain the fertiliser company Apatrit. Yet the big breakthrough came in late 1995 when he acquired Yukos, Russia’s second biggest oil producing company, from Boris Berezovsky in loans-for-shares auctions, for $300m. Even then the line between politics and business was hard to draw. In 1996 Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky and Guzinskii helped re-elect Boris Yelstin, according to Yelstin’s biographer, Timothy Colton. At the time Berezovsky was the most politically active of the oligarchs.

By 2000, however, Khodorkovsky seemed to breach the unwritten rules of the game. He rebranded himself with the help of a PR firm; he founded the Open Russia foundation, to encourage liberal values and broader education; he also turned Yukos into a transparent, Western-style conglomerate. This last apparently innocuous and praiseworthy gesture won Yukos increased loyalty from foreign investors, and shares soared, but worried the Kremlin inner circle, who saw it as the thin end of the wedge, a threat to their power. Misha publicly stated that the Kremlin had problems with corruption; televised for all to see, a furious Putin retorted that Yukos should be investigated for possible tax evasion. Not that everything about Yukos seemed pristine, even by Khodorkovsky’s admission. In the eponymous film by Cyril Tuschi, Khodorkovsky — whose screenings in Moscow and St Petersburg were abruptly cancelled this year — the man himself is quoted as saying: ‘Yes, we bent moral standards, but those standards matched those of the society we were in…’ The Yukos acquisition at knock- down prices saw Menatep assuming $2bn in debt; in 2001 the bank was declared broke. Worse followed when the state arrested Khodorkovsky’s deputy, Platon Lebedev. In the film Misha admits he knew he would be next, but he wanted to tell the truth in court… while admitting “I was naïve about justice”. Sure enough he was arrested onboard his private jet on a landing strip in Siberia in 2003. After an 11-month trial, for tax evasion, he was sentenced to 15 years. In 2005 Roman Abramovich ousted Khodorkovsky from Forbes magazine’s Russian Rich List — “the ultimate indignity in the world of the super-wealthy”, according to the BBC.

During the build up to the collapse of communism, there was a growing awareness among Soviet authorities that they would need to create a Russian elite, a native super-rich class, that could acquire state assets and keep them on Russian soil. Screeds have been written about the Jewish preponderance in the top-ranking business elite. One theory suggests that because Jews were traditionally excluded from the centres of Communist Party power, especially in post-war Russia, they developed skills on the unofficial peripheral market which came into play when the Marxist edifice of a centrally run economy collapsed in 1991. However, the theory develops holes when we look closer: most oligarchs were not cunning black marketeers in the Soviet days, but often clerks, scientists and technicians, even mathematics professors, who operated, quietly, within the system. As it was virtually impossible for Jews to enter high profile Moscow Universities, many studied at less prestigious establishments like the Institute of Oil and Gas where they were, later, ideally placed to develop Russia’s lucrative Oil trade. Certainly, the lifting of restrictions on Jewish professions combined with the licence to develop private enterprise may go some way to account for the fact that by the early 1990s, six out of seven of Russia’s richest tycoons were Jewish or part-Jewish.

Of the Yeltsin-era oligarchs, who enjoyed particularly close relations with the government, few have managed either to retain their fortunes or stay in Russia under Putin. Years in the KGB gave Putin a mistrust of the individual and his rule has seen the restoration of state authority over the once all-powerful magnates. Roman Abramovich, formerly favoured by the Kremlin, was forced to sell 72% of his assets to the Russian state before finding a bolt-hole in the UK, also the haven for his former business associate Vladimir Berezovsky. Heeding the warnings, Leonid Nevzhlin, Khodorkovsky’s original business partner, moved to Israel where he enjoys the status of major philanthropist and friend of Binyamin Netanyahu. Unlike his fellow oligarchs, Khodorkovsky chose to stand his ground and use his inordinate wealth to help shape the free and democratic Russia he wanted to live in.

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Three cities, three continents, three faiths. In Egypt’s Tahrir square, young secular activists worked together with members of the banned Muslim brotherhood in their shared goal to overthrow Mubarak’s regime. In New York, over 1000 people attended a Kol Nidrei service at the site of Occupy Wall Street. In London, protestors camped in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, causing resignations of many clergy and ruptures within the entire Church of England. Religion has been a surprising but consistent presence in the movement, though its influence has often been implicit rather than overt. Whatever the individual beliefs of its proponents, in the absence of an alternative vocabulary, the Occupy movement has been forced to fall back upon the language of religion to articulate its critique of contemporary society. Today’s challenge to the financial system based on values and collective morality has unearthed a world never fully buried by the Enlightenment.

‘Occupy’ was a brand name given to an already existent movement. Widely accepted to have begun in Egypt, the Occupy movement spread to Spain with ‘Los Indignagos’, to Greece’s anti-austerity campaigners, to Israel’s tent protests and from there to New York and other American cities such as Oakland. Other countries have followed, and Canada, the UK, Australia, Italy and New Zealand have all seen spin off protests. The Occupy movement was, in fact, a response to the seismic events across Europe and the Arab world — from the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the governments brought down in its wake (Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Spain and Italy), to the Arab Spring, which toppled tyrannical regimes. The events operated within an overall domino effect, which continues to spread. While the Western protests attack the financial system and an élite — the 1% — acting in their own interests against the majority — the 99% — the Arab protests call for democracy and regime change. But in both cases protestors are motivated by inequality and disempowerment. Arguably, the events following the collapse of Lehman Brothers ignited the revolutions in the middle east; the end of the boom era and a rapid rise in grain prices (as investors deserted the derivatives market in favour of commodities) meant that governments could no longer paper over corruption and kleptocracy with state hand outs. As a result, we seem to have a global uprising that is relatively coherent, being broad enough (and still largely powerless enough) to encompass socialists, libertarians, moral conservatives, Islamists and many others, revisiting the ‘One No, Many Yeses’ of 1990s anti-capitalism.

Despite this theoretical diversity, the ‘movement’ finds unity, and is distinguished by two key features. The first is a critique of current society, that is so thoroughgoing it demands a wholesale rethinking of underlying assumptions. The second is practical action: the taking and holding of space. Functioning as a declaration of presence by groups in the middle and bottom of society, the right to assemble and live on both public and privately owned land has become a cornerstone of the movement.

Construction of St Paul’s Cathedral began in 1669 in the wake of the English civil war, and the restoration of the monarchy. It was the first post-reformation cathedral in England and was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, who had designed over fifty churches in the City of London, already a major centre of banking and international trade. By the time it was completed in 1708, England was on the way to becoming a leading economic power. St Paul’s stands as a monument to the triumph of bourgeois capitalism, having seen off the twin challenges of overbearing monarchy from above and radical populism from below. The Church of England at this point was already stepping back from political affairs in a move that would culminate in its eventual relegation to guardian of faith and personal morality. This kind of privatised religion went hand in hand with a new Enlightenment liberal philosophy which championed the individual above the community; the state over the local, and the progressive over the traditional. In economic terms, this meant encouraging flexible and open markets based upon a belief in rational, self-interested behaviour. Issues of meaning and purpose were increasingly confined to the private sphere, as the new and revolutionary doctrine of separation between church and state took hold.

From the Middle Ages up until that point, the church had been the epicentre of a society in which community, politics, ritual and custom were intrinsically bound together. It had offered a vision of a unified, stratified society in which each man had his place, and the sum of all its parts was in accordance with divine design. This system survived many major economic and political developments. Christian socialist R.H. Tawney writes of the 16th century’s ‘constant appeal from the new and clamorous economic interests of the day to the traditional Christian morality, which in social organization, as in the relation of individuals, is still conceived to be the final authority’. Despite the vast economic changes of the late middle ages, the idea that society was a spiritual organ designed for salvation subjugated economic activity to some notion of the greater good.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Church power in Europe was decimated, slowly losing any privileged role as guardian of community and values. But it was never replaced, and its vacuum left a thin social fabric, a lack of third space between work and home, and a public discourse that had difficulty agreeing any set terms for moral debate. The contemporary result of this process is that any movement wishing to build a moral critique of our economic system almost inevitably falls back upon the vocabulary of religion, as the cultural memory of the Church represents our only notion of an alternative society. Hence Occupy London’s language of usury, indulgence, unfair gain and of a breakdown of the social fabric of assembly and community. This is to say nothing of explicit religious slogans around moneylenders and the temple, or the large banner outside St Paul’s asking ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ A pertinent critique has been made of those who profit without creating anything of use, targeting the high pay of those who traded in currencies and derivatives rather than in actual commodities. This is an ancient idea, echoing the words of Gratian, a 12th century monk and canon law jurist:

Whosoever buys a thing, not that he may gain sell it whole and unchanged but that it may be a material for fashioning something, he is no merchant. But the man who buys it may gain by selling it again unchanged and as he bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from God’s temple.

This alternative religious ethic appeals to a perfectionist ideal of human behaviour, holding that each individual should do useful work in a ‘real’ economy, and that continuous economic growth is less important than values of stability and community.

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All good heroes have to change. So all the storytelling gurus and literary theorists, from Aristotle onwards, agree. If you get to Act III and there’s been no transformation, you’ve lost your audience. There are, of course, exceptions: sit-com protagonists rarely change; there are a few great ‘stuck’ characters, like Peter Pan, whose very inability to grow is the hallmark of their identity; and high literature sometimes throws up a clever-dick like Ovid, who wrote an epic, Metamorphoses, in which the hero was Change itself. But, in Hollywood at least, the Rule of Change is a hurdle few heroes can vault.

The tricky bit, for writers, is that their heroes must also stay the same. It’s no good having Han Solo slough off his vanity and cynicism and embrace the Light Side, if it turns him into another earnest Luke Skywalker. Elizabeth I’s transformation from woman of passion to ivory-skinned Virgin Queen only moves us if we know her passion is still seething beneath her leaden foundation.

Seen in this context,  Mel Gibson’s decision to make a film about Judah Maccabee comes straight out of the screenwriting primer. Right now, Gibson is at the nadir of the Act II crisis — what script-doctors call ‘Descent to the Deepest Cave.’ Already consumed by alcoholism and battered by domestic strife, Gibson has branded himself a pariah with his rants about Jews. He has to change. But his redemptive transformation will be entirely in character. For, as with Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, the story of Judah Maccabee offers the opportunity for a rich historical drama, with lovingly evoked scenes of sadistic torture and a hero prevailing against numerically superior but spiritually impoverished foes. Only this time, it will be a Jewish hero. Presto, change-o, Mel is kosher again — and yet somehow he’s still Mel. But what exactly is a Jewish hero? And does Judah Maccabee count as one, anyway? The figure of the Jewish hero is a contested one. Here’s a conversation I recently overheard between two old schoolfriends:

A: I don’t like the Israeli-type macho hero. I prefer my Jewish heroes old school.

B: Like Bar Kochba?

A: Like Franz Kafka. The little specky guy who thinks too much. Who can’t really get his head round having a body — let alone putting it in danger. Not the IDF commando with his wraparound shades. There’s nothing Jewish about wraparound shades.

B: Yeah, but without the commando to protect him, Kafka gets killed by the Nazis.

A: The Nazis didn’t kill Kafka. B: Communists, then.

ME: Can’t you two shut up while the game’s on?

Which, I realise now, implicitly put me in B’s camp. As for the Maccabees, if they are heroes they are curiously uncelebrated ones. At cheder the details of the Chanukah story were always left vague. Occasionally I, or another mystified child, would pipe up, asking who exactly the Maccabees were fighting, and over what, and why they sounded so Scottish. No one ever explained. No one bothered to mention how Alexander the Great conquered most of the known world; how his empire fused local traditions with Greek culture — the gym, the games, the theatre, the household as a hive of economic productivity (this was ancient Greece); how little Judaea managed to retain a degree of religious and political independence as part of the Seleucid empire; how tensions between Hellenized and traditional Jews escalated into something close to civil war; how the Seleucid king Antiochus IV waded in on the Hellenisers’ side, massacring Jews, banning traditional practices, gruesomely torturing dissenters; and how these outrages kindled a rebellion under the command of a provincial priest’s son called Judas Maccabeus, who waged a guerilla campaign against the might of the empire. (In addition to their vagueness about the bigger picture, our teachers glossed over the little details left on the ground when the Maccabees forcibly mass circumcised the Hellenised Jews they conquered. But rest assured that that’s one bit Mel won’t cut.)

The apocryphal texts certainly trumpet Judah as a great military and religious leader. He is implicitly compared to the judges, especially Joshua, who, like him, waged a divinely inspired war of conquest against pagan neighbours. And yet, being a great military leader does not make him a hero in any way that his people would have understood. Nowadays the term ‘hero’ can be used loosely to describe any protagonist, or, for tabloid newspapers, any professional soldier. But the word was originally, of course, Greek. And the notion of a Jewish hero, to a traditional Jew of Judah’s time, would have been nothing less than a contradiction in terms. For heroes were not only foreign — they were blasphemous. The Greeks were literal hero-worshippers: the cultic worship of figures like Hercules and Theseus was ubiquitous across the Greek world. Indeed, having a cult in your name was the only absolute requirement for the job of hero. That said, an all-action background was preferred: some heroes were great statesmen or lawgivers or even artists in life, but being big and violent was a definite plus. The basic mould of the hero was the warrior or the athlete, and the foundational texts of Greek culture were the Homeric epics, in which prodigiously big and strong men relentlessly compete — in war, games and sometimes love — for honour. This battle for personal martial or athletic glory and cult worship is what makes these heroes so unjewish. ‘Kafka heroes’ were thin on the rocky ground of Greece. It’s true you get the odd outlier like Odysseus, who’s big and violent but also wordy. And then there’s Oedipus, who’s big and violent but has a complicated relationship with his mother. But what is lacking is anything akin to Judaeo-Christian morality. Certainly, Homeric heroes had a value system. But the key value they fought and died for was their kleos: their honour, their name, the story that would be told of them down the ages, accompanied by the sacrifices that would nourish their immortal shades. They were not required to embody or fight for anything that we — or the Judeans — would have recognised as good against evil.

The full version of this essay is available in the printed Jewish Quarterly. Please go here to subscribe.

The notion that Jewish men are somehow less masculine than their gentile counterparts is an old anti-Semitic trope: Jewish men menstruate, medieval anti-Semites asserted, and need periodic top-ups of human blood.The ancient Greeks abhorred circumcision, and Antiochus IV, the Seleucid king, tried to have it banned. ‘The castration complex,’ said Freud, ‘is the deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism; for even in the nursery little boys hear that a Jew has something cut off his penis—a piece of his penis, they think—and this gives them the right to despise Jews.’

No one has done more to spread the notion that Jewish men are not real men than Otto Weininger, the fin de siècle Viennese philosopher who divided humanity into two types:masculine and feminine. His distinction was based not upon biology but temperament, thus the world was peopled by masculine women and feminine men.Weininger (who converted to Christianity) conflates what he calls feminine traits (cowardliness, passivity, amorality, unreason and sex) with ‘Jewishness’. Genius, naturally, is Christian—or, to be more precise, Aryan. He excoriates Judaism, attributing to it all the faults he finds with modernity—capitalism, materialism, Marxism, amorality, decadence, deracination, decline. Avoiding both the ‘biological’ racism of the Nazis that followed in his wake and the religious prejudice that preceded him,Weininger identifies Judaism as ‘a tendency of the mind, as a psychological constitution which is a possibility for all mankind, but which has become actual in the most conspicuous fashion amongst the Jews.’ In his magnum opus, Sex and Character, he describes the paradig- matic feminised Jew. It bears an uncanny, albeit jaundiced, resemblance to The Herring Wonder, the boxing moniker of cult novelist Jonathan Ames.

Jonathan Ames—I hesitate, post-Baudrillard, to say the ‘real’ Ames, so let’s just call him the flesh and blood Ames— made his literary debut in 1989 with I Pass Like Night, the edgy, blackly funny story of Alexander Vine, a young doorman who trawls Manhattan’s underworld for sex.The novel, written in a non-linear ‘mosaic’ style, was published when Ames was 25 and established him as the successor to ultra-cool WASP doomster Brett Easton Ellis—all but inevitable given his age and the book’s hardcore sex scenes. He was compared to JD Salinger and Phillip Roth called Alexander Vine ‘a cross between Jean Genet and Holden Caulfield in the age of AIDS’. A decade later Ames wrote The Extra Man, a novel which catapulted more low-life male casualties into the pantheon of literary characters: Louis Ives, a disgraced cross-dressing schoolteacher, shares a shabby New York apartment with Henry Harrison, a flamboyant would-be playwright who supports himself financially as an ‘extra man’ (a companion to moneyed elderly women). Like Vine, Ives is a sex junkie who spends his nights consorting with transsexual prostitutes. In a further Weiningerian twist, Ives cultivates good manners and aspires to be the perfect English gentleman, ‘a sort of a Jewish Duke of Windsor’. According to Weininger, the English are less manly than Aryans though not as bad as Jews, and, unlike Jews and women, capable of being considered ‘gentlemen’. When Ives ruminates on the impossibility of being a gentleman and a Jew he could very well be talking to Weininger. ‘There were no such Jewish [gentlemen] characters in any of [the books he reads], and to make things worse, all my favourite authors, I always found out, were heart-breakingly anti-Semitic. I worshipped them and they wouldn’t have even liked me. So their anti-Semitism and my Semitism were the major flaws in my young gentleman fantasy, but I tried not to think about these things most of the time.’

A decade later Ames published his third novel, Wake Up, Sir!, in which alcoholic writer Alan Blair checks himself into a Saratoga Springs artists’ colony populated by an assortment of oddballs. Alan Blair is virtually identical to Jonathan A., the hero of Ames’s graphic novel The Alcoholic (drawn by Dean Haspiel), and readers will recognise not only his trademark perversions, afflictions and biographical details (Jewish, New Jersey upbringing) but also his peculiar physiognomy—the pale skin, white, near invisible eyebrows, closely cropped hair disguising a vanishing hairline and curved nose. Like Ives, Alan Blair also suffers delusions of Englishness, although this time it is not the delusion that he is a gentleman but the delusion that he is constantly attended to by a gentleman’s gentleman: a phantom Wodehousian butler called—what else?—Jeeves, who gives him succour and arch, but practical, advice. Once again, the disconnect between the romantic longing for a genteel way of life and the sobering reality of a dipsoma- niacal New Jersey Jew on a self-destructive bender receives satirical treatment. ‘Satire,’ says Weininger, ‘is essentially intolerant, and is congruous with the disposition of the Jew and the woman.’

Ames belongs to a long tradition of self-referential writers and comedians. He credits Kerouac, Hunter Thompson and other writers whose legends precede their art with his own ‘fantasy of being a writer’. Stories abound of Ames living out various writer fantasies, notably his ‘Hemingway phase’, in which his nose got broken in a bar fight, and his Fitzgerald fantasy, in which he adopted the sartorial style and alcoholic excesses of F. Scott Fitzgerald. These fantasies are part of a more persistent hard-man fantasy which Ames plays out through his curious boxing career, undermining the machismo of the violent sport by fighting under the moniker ‘The Herring Wonder’, while his fans waved home-made herrings made from tinfoil and cardboard.

‘The Jew,’ says Weininger, ‘is ready to be witty only at his own expense or on sexual things.’An uncharitable critic might say the same of Ames. Send him on an assignment, as GQ did, to cover the gentrification of New York’s Meatpacking district and he’ll tell you of an encounter there thirteen years earlier with a transsexual streetwalker. Give him a column in the New York Press and he’ll tell you about his pre-teen trouble with an undescended left testicle, or the nice French woman doctor who broke his heart when she smiled as she dipped his penis in brown liquid to get rid of his genital wart, or even the Mangina, a prêt-a-porter prosthetic vagina for men created by his performance artist friend Patrick Bucklew (a.k.a. Harry Chandler). But his emasculation, according to Weininger, begins before all this, in the very moment in which he picks up his reporter’s notebook:‘The congruity between Jews and women,’ he writes, ‘further reveals itself in the extreme adaptability of the Jews, in their great talent for journalism.’

Bored to Death, an HBO comedy series recently broadcast on Sky Atlantic, stars Jason Schwartzman as Jonathan Ames, a troubled writer (drinks, drugs and an overactive libido) who moonlights as an unlicensed private investigator. The show was based on a short story of the same name about a troubled writer named Jonathan Ames whose stint as an unlicensed P.I. ends as darkly as a David Goodis or Jim Thompson paperback. The show and the hardboiled tale were written by Jonathan Ames, a troubled writer who has never worked as a private eye. ‘The psychological contents of the Jewish mind are always double or multiple,’ writes Weininger. As the title of the anthology where you can find the story of Jonathan Ames, the troubled writer who poses as something he is not, puts it, The Double Life Is Twice As Good.

Bored To Death series 1 is on Sky Atlantic at 10pm on Mondays. The new second series will be on Atlantic later in the year

Sean Shapiro is a freelance journalist. He and co-editor Dominic Lee founded the (now defunct) South African culture magazine, MIMIzine. He is currently working on a comic book adaptation of Oliver Onion’s classic ghost story, Benlian.

© Yuri Dojc. Last Folio: Textures of Jewish Life in Slovakia by Yuri Dojc and Katya Krausova published by Indiana University Press

The Street of Crocodiles—Celina Wieniewska’s translation of Bruno Schulz’s stories (originally published in Polish under the title Cinnamon Shops)—is the tree from which Jonathan Safran Foer carves his latest work, Tree of Codes. Carves, with a knife—a real rather than metaphorical one—excising most of Schulz’s words to form new phrases and sentences with those remaining. Foer writes that he has long wished ‘to create a die-cut book by erasure, a book whose meaning was exhumed from another book’ and that he chose The Street of Crocodiles, being the richest text that he knows,‘feeling that [he] was…transcribing a dream that The Street of Crocodiles might have had’. Tree of Codes, he acknowledges, ‘is a small response to that great book’ and part of ‘The Great Book’ from which all Schulz’s stories come. Foer takes his place in a line of western writers who have appropriated not just Schulz’s modest oeuvre but also his life story, rendering the figure of Schulz himself as a symbol of loss and absence.

Bruno Schulz’s literary career began in 1934 and was abruptly cut short by the Second World War.As early as the 1920s he had received some recognition as a graphic artist but his discovery, by the psychological-realist prose writer, Zofia Nałkowska, led to the publication of his short story collection, Cinnamon Shops.This established him as one of the leading proponents of the Polish avantgarde, alongside such writers as Witold Gombrowicz and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (‘Witkacy’). Following the war, all experimental writing was suppressed by the Communists, who enforced a rigid cultural agenda of Socialist Realism, and it was not until the Thaw in 1956 that Schulz’s works were published again. Schulz’s biographer, the poet Jerzy Ficowski, dedicated much of his life to tracing his lost letters and drawings; he never gave up searching for Schulz’s legendary lost novel, The Messiah, which is said to have been given to non-Jewish friends for safekeeping (or perhaps sent to Thomas Mann, whose Joseph and his Brothers he greatly admired).

When Schulz’s work began to appear in English it was accompanied by the dramatic story of his death. As a Jew with valuable artistic talents, Schulz had enjoyed the protection of a Nazi officer named Felix Landau who employed him to paint murals for his children. During an anti-Jewish action known as ‘Black Thursday’ in Schulz’s home town of Drohobycz on November 19, 1942, Landau allegedly shot a Jewish dentist who was protected by another Nazi officer named Karl Günther.The story, told by Izydor Friedman to Ficowski, is that Günther shot Schulz in revenge, with the line ‘you shot my Jew; I shot your Jew’. These words, uttered over the body of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, are so ghoulishly mesmerising that they threaten to overshadow Schulz’s own luminous words.

He never gave up searching for Schulz’s legendary lost novel, The Messiah

This death-scene has acquired mythical status. For many Jewish writers, it has come to represent the rupture with a golden age of Jewish writing to which they lay claim by virtue of their own second-generation experience of displacement and unresolved trauma. David Grossman (See Under: Love), Cynthia Ozick (The Messiah of Stockholm), and Philip Roth (The Prague Orgy) have all built legends around Schulz, invoking his biographical figure as a trope in their own stories. Each of these works incorporates a fictionalised character or lost literary father based on the figure of Schulz, who is easily identified by references to his stories, the lost manuscript of his novel, The Messiah, and the dramatic story of his death.

Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm recounts the obsession of Lars Andemening, an unappreciated literary reviewer for The Stockholm Morgentorn, with the stories and drawings of Bruno Schulz, whom he believes to be his actual father. He embarks on a quest to find the lost manuscript of The Messiah and is aided and thwarted in his goal by an elderly book dealer, Heidi, and her usually absent husband, Dr. Eklund. He obtains a manuscript, authenticated by Dr. Eklund as Schulz’s, that describes a desolate Drohobycz in which the people have been replaced by stone idols.The Messiah arrives—a feathery creature with wings resembling pages from a book—to find the idols burning each other. The Messiah gives birth to a small bird that lands on all the idols, causing them to burn up, leaving Drohobycz empty. Having read it, Lars becomes suspicious. He accuses Dr. Eklund of forging the manuscript and rashly sets it on fire in its brass jar. Eklund is an acknowledged forger, but it is unclear in the end whether he has forged the manuscript or if the manuscript itself was real but he had faked other documents for the purpose of smuggling the manuscript out of Poland.

The symbolism of Ozick’s proposed reconstruction reflects a postwar vision of a Jewish land without Jews. Its former population, having escaped to the familiar destinations of Jewish emigrés, are replaced by stones. Even the stones are burned up,like the markers of Jewish graves bulldozed after the war to make way for progress.The remarkable fiction of Drohobycz has been ‘invaded by the characters of an unknown alphabet’.With the former Jews of Drohobycz succeeded only by their remnants, the text experiences its own Holocaust inside the brass amphora.
The problem of the work, and one it shares with Grossman’s and Roth’s, is the seeming incommensurability that the postwar generation feels with regard to the world of their parents and grandparents.With the loss of family ties to Russia and Eastern Europe, those born in the West also lost the linguistic ties necessary to maintain continuity with that culture. The age of Schulz is, for these later writers, what the Age of Genius was for Schulz, as he described it in a 1936 letter to the critic Andrzej Plesniewicz—a time of ‘primordial childhood’ or a ‘messianic time’, which ‘is promised and sworn to us by all mythologies’.

The age of Schulz is, for these later writers, what the age of genius was for Schulz… a time of ‘primordial childhood’ or a ‘messianic time’, which ‘is promised and sworn to us by all mythologies’.

Philip Roth’s epilogue to the Zuckerman trilogy, The Prague Orgy, is cast as a fragment from Nathan Zuckerman’s notebooks, in which he meets a Czech writer, Zdenek Sisovsky, and his companion, an actress, Eva Kalinova, (famous in Prague for her Chekhovian roles). Sisovsky describes his father as a Jew who wrote stories about Jews in Yiddish (unlike Schulz). This father has a Czech wife and children (who do not resemble him), but then the resemblance to Schulz grows: he is a shy high-school teacher who is protected during the war by a Nazi until he is killed by a rival Gestapo officer, a revenge killing for a Jewish dentist killed by the first officer, explained by the unmistakable line: ‘He shot my Jew; so I shot his.’ It later transpires, however, that Sisovsky’s father was hit by a bus, and the story about the revenge killing ‘happened to another writer, who didn’t even write inYiddish.Who didn’t have a wife or have a child.’ On the one hand, it seems that Roth is indulging in the creation of a literary father from Schulz’s biography, and at the same time, he recognises that it is a lie.The strength of Roth’s story rests in that tension between the desire to have had such a literary father and the acknowledgment of its impossibility. David Grossman’s ‘Bruno’ section of See Under: Love begins with an author from Drohobycz named Bruno, who is taken under the wing of the Polish writer and artist Zofia Nałkowska (known for his grotesque drawings in which he often portrays himself in submissive positions under the heel of a servant girl named Adela). Grossman’s Bruno is described as carrying a manuscript called The Messiah and jumping off a dock in the port of Danzig where he has escaped to see the Edward Munch exhibition.These details come from Schulz’s biography (except for the escape to Danzig) and several lines quoted later in the chapter come from Schulz’s texts and are attributed to those works by title: Bruno’s works are the works of Bruno Schulz, though Grossman’s Bruno is not actually Bruno Schulz—a fact acknowledged by the author-narrator within the work, who confirms that‘[i]t’s not their Bruno I’m writing about’ and then recounts his first encounter with The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. It goes without saying that he retells the ‘I killed your Jew’ story of Landau and Gunther, although Grossman reverses the sequence of events.Then he spins a tale of his Bruno being consumed by the ocean, stirring elements of reality (the words ‘I killed your Jew’) into fantasy—the moment of death expanded over about a hundred pages. Still haunted by these words years later, Grossman went on, in 2009, to publish an interview in The New Yorker with Ze’ev Fleischer, a survivor of the Nazi ‘Black Thursday’ action in which Schulz was killed. Fleischer’s account of the sequence of events leading up to Schulz’s death affirms the rivalry between Landau and Günther, but raises questions about whether Schulz was actually shot by Günther or by common soldiers, and whether he said those dramatic words at the time of Schulz’s death, if at all.

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss does not have an explicit Schulz figure or a manuscript called The Messiah but is shot through with fragments of Schulz: a lost manuscript that emerges from a correspondence between the author and a woman who inspired him; several references to The Street of Crocodiles; a mysterious writer character named Bruno who functions as the conscience of one of her protagonists;Leo Gursky, an aging retired Jewish locksmith who once aspired to be a writer but here functions as a lost father in search of his son. Gursky’s structural counter- weight—perhaps a literary granddaughter—is a young woman named Alma Singer in search of the ‘Alma’ she was named after, who inspired a character named Alma in a novel entitled The History of Love. In keeping with the ancient mythology mapped out in Schulz’s own writing, the evanescent Yiddish manuscript is drowned in a flood, although in the supremely interconnected world of Krauss’s novel nothing is ever quite lost: the lost father knows where his son is, and the son eventually knows where the father is, and the author of the lost manuscript knows who has it, and even when the original is lost it appears in translation and a translation of a translation. There is some hope, in the fragmented world, of restoring lost connections.

Poetry happens when short-circuits of sense occur between words, a sudden regeneration of the primeval myths.

Salman Rushdie offers a fascinating and unmistakable homage to Bruno Schulz, first identified by Canadian scholar and novelist Norman Ravvin, in the last section of The Moor’s Last Sigh. The hero and narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, travels from Cochin, India, to Benengeli (a mountain village in Andalusia) to see Vasco Miranda, a long lost admirer of his mother’s. The village takes on a magical quality akin to Schulz’s Drohobycz, particularly a district called the Street of Parasites which resembles the very ‘parasitical quarter’ Schulz names the ‘Street of Crocodiles’:
…I felt as if I were in some sort of interregnum, in some timeless zone under the sign of an hourglass in which the sand stood motionless, or a clepsydra whose quicksilver had ceased to flow. [...] I wandered down sausage-festooned streets of bakeries and cinnamon shops, smelling, instead, the sweet scents of meat and pastries and fresh-baked bread, and surrendered myself to the cryptic laws of the town.
The hourglass is a clear reference to Schulz’s second collection of stories—The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass—and is translated into Polish as klepsydra (either a sandglass or a mercury or water clock—‘clepsydra’ in English). ‘Under the sign of the hourglass’ is a common idiomatic form in Polish for referring to a business establishment, usually a cafe or restaurant, denoted by a distinctive sign or architectural ornament above the door. What Rushdie borrows from Schulz, however, is not merely an architectural idiom or biographical detail, but a metaphysical essence of Schulz’s imagined world: a sense of suspended time and a feeling of rootedness in displacement itself, which he transposes onto his own historical and cultural context.

In contrast with Western writers at pains to use Schulz as a cultural conduit to their own European past, are Polish and East European writers who come from the same cultural tradition as him. For these writers, Schulz is not a distant figure representing absence and loss but an exciting figure of the interwar avantgarde that paved the way for the most adventurous work of the postwar era in Poland. Key to this movement is Schulz’s idea that there was a mythological structure underlying all language and repre- sentation, which he articulated in his brilliant essay ‘The Mythicisation of Reality’:

Poetry happens when short-circuits of sense occur between words, a sudden regeneration of the primeval myths. . . . Not one scrap of an idea of ours does not originate in myth,isn’t transformed, mutilated, denatured mythology.The most fundamental function of the spirit is inventing fables, creating tales. . . . [T]he building materials [that the search for human knowledge] uses were used once before; they come from forgotten, fragmented tales or ‘histories’. Poetry recognises these lost meanings, restores words to their places, connects them by the old semantics.

This idea—that even the trivial and mundane had an underlying mythic structure—shaped the imaginations and work of countless Eastern European writers and artists, and the proliferation of Schulzean figures and references across this work testifies to this legacy.The Polish dramatist and visual artist,Tadeusz Kantor, uses characters and images from Schulz and from the work of Witold Gombrowicz’s interwar avant-garde fiction, in his great work for the stage, The Dead Class. Kantor’s work in the theatre began with underground productions of the pre-war dramas of Witkiewicz, who was also a great advocate of Schulz’s work. Kantor adapts characters like Adela the servant-girl, a sexually dominant woman in Schulz’s mythology: in Schulz, she sweeps her broom through the air to clear the birds from the father’s attic but in Kantor’s mythic world she becomes a force for destruction.There is a distinct pall of death hanging over this work,but it comes from Kantor’s own experience of the war rather than his references to the world of Bruno Schulz.

The contemporary Polish writer, Olga Tokarczuk, whose own novel Primeval and OtherTimes is required reading for Polish high school students, recently cited Schulz as one of her greatest influences. Unlike other writers she does not appropriate the paraphernalia of Schulz’s world. But she comes closer to its essence through this infusion of the everyday with the mythic. but As a trained Jungian psychologist, her work deals with the intersection of the archetypal with daily life and her recent novel, Drive Your Plough Through the Bones of the Dead (not yet translated into English) reveals a keen interest in astrology. A pre-scientific art of psychological or social types (like astrology) should, she suggests, be seen as a rich source of symbolism and wisdom, a power Schulz acknowledges in the story ‘Tailors Dummies’ in which the sight of two fish top-to-tail on a plate transforms ordinary time into mythic time:
We assembled again around the table, the shop assistants rubbed their hands, red from the cold, and the prose of their conversation suddenly revealed a full grown day, a gray and empty Tuesday, a day without tradition and without a face. But it was only when a dish appeared on the table containing two large fish in jelly lying side by side, head-to-tail, like a sign of the zodiac, that we recognised in them the coat of arms of that day, the calendar emblem of the nameless Tuesday.

In your novels, past calamities are nothing but milestones of self-discovery.

An obsession with Schulz seems to satisfy a particularly American search for the self, a trope not lost on the Eastern European writers of today. Anya Ulinich, the young Russian-American translingual author of the satirical novel, Petropolis (2007) about Russian immigration in the United States, has a story called ‘The Nurse and the Novelist’. This includes a conversation between a young male novelist and a woman who has sacrificed her own education to work as a nurse to support her graduate-student husband. The novelist, now successful and living with his family in a condominium near the nurse’s apartment, began his career as a depressed Manhattan writer wrestling with the demons of his identity and searching for his East European roots in a suburb of Minsk that had once been a shtetl destroyed during the war. They meet in a grocery store and arrange to have coffee, where the nurse tells the novelist: ‘In your novels, past calamities are nothing but milestones of self-discovery. The central question is: “Why am I collecting toenails in a jar?” It only takes a village of dead Jews to figure it out.’ Ulinich denies, despite the resem- blances, that this is a satire on Foer’s first novel, Everything is Illuminated, but it is instructive that it was widely ready as such, because it seems to capture what Foer’s detractors find so infuriating—the assumption of the identity, and, by implication, the suffering of others for narcissistic ends. Beyond Schulz and his oeuvre, there is a broader tension around the appropriation of East European identity that has manifested itself in contemporary ‘translingual’ writers like Gary Shteyngart, Andreï Makine, and Wladimir Kaminer—Russian-born writers with Western literary careers, writing in Western languages. Adrian Wanner, in an excellent essay on this subject published in The Slavic Review in 2008, recounts the illustrative tale of two reviews of Makine’s Le Testament Français by the Russian writer Tatiana Tolstaia, praising the novel for its ‘Russianness’ in The New York Review of Books and vilifying it in her review for Znamia for a Russian audience. Everything is Illuminated, in which an American student sharing the name of the author travels to Ukraine in search of the rescuer of his grandfather, likewise wasn’t received with as much enthusiasm in Ukraine as it was in the United States. Ukrainian scholar Ivan Katchanovski typified this response in his review in The Prague Post in 2004, criticising the novel for its negative stereotypes of Ukrainians and for omitting important details about the role of Ukrainian partisans who resisted the Nazis and defended Jews during the war in the towns named in the novel.
Perhaps these works that revive Schulz in fiction are only a sign that what we want is more Schulz. Krauss, at least, offers the hope that something lost is only lost to those who don’t know where it is or haven’t looked hard enough to find it. Perhaps the reason that Schulz appeals to writers struggling with a very personal sense of loss is that though he appears, from the postwar perspective, to have come from an Age of Genius, he, too, is writing about a lost world.The Drohobycz of Franz Joseph and the Emperor Maximilian, figures in Schulz’s postage stamp album, was actually a childhood legend (Franz Joseph having passed through the region in 1880, twelve years before Schulz’s birth): oil refineries and businesses were pushing aside the culture of that former era,and transitional urban spaces like the ‘Street of Crocodiles’ were displacing the ‘Cinnamon Shops’ of old. If modern readers don’t always recognise the absences in Schulz’s world, it is because he paints such a vivid picture with the remnants of the lost world that we can hardly recognise it as already lost. And if we strip away that richness, and use him as a proxy for a sense of loss we cannot remedy, we willfully blind ourselves to what does, miraculously, survive.
David A. Goldfarb is Curator of Literature and Humanities at the Polish Cultural Institute in New York and is currently working on a book about the work of Bruno Schulz.

In 1938 Zweig intervened on behalf of a different, more humane workshop by writing an appeal in support of the Inter-Aid Committee for Children from Germany. This pamphlet was preceded by a piece on The House of Thousand Fortunes, written for the fiftieth anniversary of the Shelter in London and first published in Buenos Aires. Zweig wrote,‘The Shelter? I had never heard of it, despite residing in London for some time. Never has anyone alerted me to this place, this institution. But the curious thing is that all these Jews coming from the most distant and exotic destinations are fully aware of its existence. In Poland, the Ukraine, Latvia and Bulgaria, from one end of Europe to the other, all the poor Jews know the London Shelter.’ It was rare for Zweig to concern himself with ‘the poor Jews’; thoughts on East European Jewry in the Hapsburg Empire appear with the same frequency as God himself in Zweig’s writing. A rare exception occurred when he saw Galicia in 1915 and described it as the ‘Job amongst the peoples of the world’. But it was mainly through his friendship with Joseph Roth that Zweig gained insight into the reality of poor Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

The essence of Jewish identity was to demonstrate to the world that Jews could transcend it

Was the London Shelter a transit place for Jewish refugees from yet another of God’s workshops? Who was this God in Zweig’s view? Clearly not the master of the largely inactive ‘angel of history’, in Walter Benjamin’s terminology, but the supreme agent of world affairs, a fusion of Yahweh, the Christian God, Allah and Visnu, a divine force who made it hard for people to believe in him.

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‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands!’We are all German Jews. This is the famous slogan taken up by throngs of students during the May 1968 protests in Paris.The cry was most immediately the response of a crowd to the news that the movement’s leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit had been denied re-entry into France after a brief trip abroad. This spontaneous act of sympathy marked an event in the history of France’s Jews, a moment when the Jew, understood as a figure on the margins of the culture, a rootless wanderer, a foreigner, publically came to represent a political ideal. As such, this event registered the history of the figure of the Jew perhaps more than the history of the Jews themselves: a moment when a shift in value, wrought by the crucible of the Shoah, manifested itself publically and politically.

May 1968 was not of course the first time that a Jew’s plight before the French authorities of Justice had incited a public outcry. One could even say that the students’ expression of solidarity with Cohn-Bendit self-consciously echoed that of the Dreyfusards, the intellectuals and politicians who defended Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French army captain falsely accused of treason in 1894. However, the Dreyfusards acted in the name of the Enlightenment ideal of humanity, an ideal uniting men above and beyond differences. As Émile Zola famously said in 1898 in his open letter to President Faure: ‘I have but one passion, that of the Enlightenment, in the name of the humanity that has suffered so much and that has a right to happiness.’ Dreyfus’s Judaism was, for his supporters, almost beside the point.The student protestors of May 1968, in contrast, allied themselves with Cohn-Bendit by adopting his Jewish identity. They protested, not in the name of an idea of humanity, but in the name of the ‘The Jew’; instead of claiming the status of the universal for Cohn-Bendit, they claimed the status of exception, of Jewish particularity for themselves.

They protested, not in the name of an idea of humanity, but in the name of the ‘The Jew’

Much was made of the slogan ‘We are all German Jews’ in the years following the student uprisings. In The Imaginary Jew, Alain Finkelkraut, a child of two World War II refugees, describes his mixed feelings of pride and violation, as the protesters declared the banner of the Jew one that could be taken up by anyone, regardless of ethnicity or religious upbringing. Maurice Blanchot, the enigmatic writer, theorist and a prominent figure within the May ‘68 movement, in contrast, not only lauded the students’ chant as one of the most powerful political acts in modern France, but also seemed to do so for the reason that Finkielkraut criticised the protesters: the students were taking up the position of the outsider rather than defending their own Frenchness. For this reason, Blanchot called it an ‘inaugural speech-event, opening and overturning borders.’ And the philosopher Jacques Rancière has described it as a paradigmatic political moment, its power arising from the very impropriety of the students’ performance, a moment of disidentification, when the students aligned themselves with a name that could not be appropriated. In examining this variety of responses, we must consider how the figure of the Jew came indeed to function as such a powerful signifier. At the heart of these responses is the question of what the figure of the Jew had itself come to symbolise in a postwar era in which the nationalist ideals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had become an anathema. It is, I contend, for the very reasons Jews had historically been maligned that among postwar French intellectuals the Jew comes to represent an ideal to be emulated.

Although the association between the Jew and rootlessness is at least as old as the medieval tale of Ahasverus, the legendary wandering Jew, it is within the context of modern nationalism that the image of Jewish rootlessness developed specifically political overtones as the foreign Jew came to represent a threat to the integrity of the nation state. In France, ear coalesced around Alfred Dreyfus, whose alleged act of treason was seen as symptomatic of the danger posed by the deracinated Jews posing as Frenchmen contaminating French blood and poisoning its soil. Dreyfus is himself depicted in a period postcard as a modern Ahasverus, hunchbacked and pulling a rickety cart. For rightwing nationalists such as Maurice Barrès, it hardly mattered whether or not Dreyfus had truly committed any crime: his guilt was ontological:‘[H]e has no roots…That Dreyfus is capable of betraying I conclude from his race. . . As for those who say that [he]. . .is not a traitor . . .So be it! They are quite right: Dreyfus doesn’t belong to our nation, so how could he betray it?’ Dreyfus was a symbol for Barrès, as were the Jews themselves. It was not so much a question of who had done what to whom but that the crowd ‘had a word of war to rally itself. It wants some cry of passion that makes abstract ideas tangible,’ Barrès wrote already in 1890 in an essay for Le Figaro about anti-Jewish sentiment.

One could say the same about the student protesters of 1968.They too needed a word around which to rally themselves and once again ‘the Jews’ functioned as the necessary symbol. The representation had largely not shifted but its value had. The Jew was still the rootless foreigner whose power derived from his very marginality. However, by 1968 the dissociation between the Jew and hegemony gave this figure a political significance. The 19th century philosopher G.W.F Hegel had declared the Jews a people standing outside of history, and it was their exterior position—historically at least—to the machinations of national powers that made the Jews an evocative figure in 1968, if not for the students directly than for those intellectuals influencing the student movement and for those influenced by it.

The figure of the Jew is never distant from Sartre’s descriptions of existentialism

By 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre had already begun indirectly to rehabilitate the figure of the Jew in Réflexions sur la Question Juive (published in English as Anti-Semite and Jew). He defined the anti-Semite as the one who flees his existential destiny by clinging to determinist ideas of essence, nature and race. In contrast he presented the Jew as something of an archetype for the everyman: faced with existential groundlessness and struggling against the fact of being over-determined by the other. Sartre asserted on multiple occasions that he himself identified with the Jew,‘a type who has nothing, no land, an intellectual.’That these are characteristics that could seem appealing, worthy even of emulation, is, to some extent at least, a result of Sartre himself, even if he himself could hardly be said to fit this description.As is clear from some of Sartre’s short fiction written in the thirties, this ideal was crafted as a direct contrast to Maurice Barrès’s conception of the self as developed in his Culte du Moi trilogy. For Barrès the identity of the self is ultimately discovered by way of the ties that bind us to nation, ancestry and soil. Thus even when not presented in these terms, the figure of the Jew is never distant from Sartre’s descriptions of existentialism.

It is however the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish émigré to Paris from Lithuania, and a former disciple of Martin Heidegger, who set out most clearly to revalorise the trope of the Jew. Like Sartre, Levinas is motivated by the failures in the philosophical project of the West to find an alternative to the dichotomy that pits a determinist particularism against a notion of freedom founded in abstract universalism. For Sartre, however, the Jew merely reflects the social and cultural dilemmas created by this dichotomy. For Levinas the history and culture of the Jew reveals a way out. Once again, it is the very reasons for which the figure of the Jew was maligned that this figure should now be venerated. That is to say, it is the Jew’s supposed position of passivity in the face of power, his uprootedness, his rejection of the cult of blood and soil that make him worthy of emulation. To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, a metaphor for the way in which European culture has privileged self-mastery over the encounter with the other, Levinas opposes ‘the story of Abraham, who leaves his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land.’ While Abraham is for Levinas first and foremost a model of ethical subjectivity and thus universal, Levinas asserts that Judaism has historically been the culture that testifies most clearly to this truth. Levinas will even suggest that it is for this very reason that the Jews have been historically maligned and persecuted. To the cult of power and earthly greatness, forces which nearly triumphed in World War II, Judaism, according to Levinas, offers not merely an escape toward transcendence, a path he identifies with both Christianity and abstract humanism, but rather, an emphasis on the neighbor, the other to whom I am responsible to the point of abnegating my own needs.

This is not to say, of course, that the student protestors of 1968 were thinking of Levinas when they claimed for themselves the banner of the German Jew. Certainly very few of them had ever read or heard of Levinas at the time. Levinas, a loyal De Gaulle supporter and fairly politically conservative by French standards, was not even sympathetic to the student movement. And his post-1948 sympathies with Zionism led him on occasion to make political interventions that seemed in tension with his own diasporic ideals. Nevertheless, Levinas’s revalorisation of the association between Jewishness and uprootedness does tell us something about Maurice Blanchot’s interpretation of the slogan in the months following the May events. It is Blanchot and ultimately Jacques Derrida who exploit for political ends the association Levinas makes between deracination and Judaism.

In their hands Levinas’ representation of Judaism becomes a cogent critique of the very nature of political belonging, one that can even be redirected against Levinas’ claim that the Jewish people could instantiate the ideal of uprootedness. For Blanchot, a life long-friend and conversation partner of Levinas’, Abraham’s act of leaving the fatherland in Genesis 12, for which he was maligned by Hegel in The Spirit of Christianity, is a diasporic lesson which bears on more than our relation to soil. It signals to the very dangers of nationalist chauvinism. ‘Everything that roots men by values, by sentiments, in one time, in one history, in one language, is the principle of alienation that constitutes man as privileged insofar as he is what he is (French, of precious French blood) imprisoning him in contentment with his own reality and encouraging him to offer it as an example or impose it as a conquering assertion.’ In contrast, he writes, ‘If Judaism is destined to take on meaning for us, it is indeed by showing that, at whatever time, one must be ready to set out, because to go out. . . is the exigency from which one cannot escape if one wants to maintain the possibility of a just relation.’ Judaism has, under Levinas’s tutelage, become for Blanchot a trope for resisting the hegemonic call of political allegiance. It is not surprising, thus, that Blanchot perceived the student chant of 1968 as a great political moment; not, as Finkielkraut understood it, one in which France’s youth tried to usurp the position of Jewish victimhood, but rather a moment when the students chose to resist their natural identification with the state and chose to go outside. It was a moment when the Jews’ supposed disconnection from soil made them a heroic exemplar, one, however that could never be properly claimed or owned by anyone. For Blanchot, Finkielkraut’s experience of usurpation was part of the point; the moment one claims to instantiate the ideal of deracination, one has elevated the value of belonging over and above the command ‘to go out from your father’s house.’ Levinas’s powerful critique of nationalism as a modern paganism requires one further step, which Levinas failed to take: its disengagement from the claim that the Jews are the paradigmatically uprooted people.This is this final step that Blanchot sees performed in the students’ gesture, not because they claim to take the place of the Jews, but because their very act reveals that the space of deracination is only occupied in a gesture of disavowel. Blanchot leads the way toward this final deracination by way of his reading of May 1968. It is, however, Derrida, the philosopher of deconstruction, much better known for his effect on American English departments than for his treatment of Judaism, who takes up the mantle.

The students of 1968 probably had no sense of themselves as performing an ironic political gesture: claiming to be what they could never be, and in so doing critiquing dominant modes of political identification. It is only analysis that unearths this significance. Derrida, on the other hand makes the ironic gesture of identification (which can simultaneously be read as an act of disidentification) a self-conscious political performance. If the students of 1968 transgress the boundaries of political identity by claiming to be what they are not, Derrida takes this procedure a step further: he claims to be a marrano. He claims, that is, to be a Jew only in secret. An impossible gesture if there ever was one and yet it follows perfectly from the history of the trope of the Jew in 20th century Europe. If the rootless Jew is, in the words of Paul Celan, the one to whom nothing belongs,‘which is not on loan, borrowed, never to be returned,’ then, in the words of Derrida, who was himself born into an Algerian-Jewish family,‘It makes it possible to say that the less you are what you are, the more you are Jewish, and as a result the less you are Jewish, the more you are Jewish . . .’ And thus the only way to remain true to the legacy of the wandering Jew is, as Derrida put it,‘to be the least and thus the last of the Jews.’ For Derrida, this claim acknowledges the inevitability of allegiances while, at the same time, performing a final act of uprooting on that structure. For Derrida, there is no doubt that this play of identity had a political significance. It was meant to trip up the impulse toward exceptionalism that accompanies claims to exemplarity. It was meant as a sign of hospitality to the other. One that was received, whether knowingly or not, when a Palestinian repeated the same trope.

The less you are what you are, the more you are Jewish, and as a result the less you are Jewish, the more you are Jewish

In August of 2000 Edward Said in an interview with Ari Shavit for Ha’aretz said, in terms that were, no doubt, meant to be provocative, ‘I am the last Jewish intellectual . . . the last one, the authentic follower of Adorno. I will articulate it like this: I am a Jewish Palestinian.’ Not surprisingly, in Said’s words Alain Finkielkraut once again smelled a threat. He registered his offense in an article for Le Débat in 2004. This claim to be the new Jews,‘the ethical Jews’ was the last frontier, he argued, in a battle to deprive ‘the ethnic Jews’ of their identity. But once again he misses what is at stake in the claim. Said is doing more here than aligning himself with a discourse of the margins. He is calling attention to the irony that the Palestinians have been uprooted by Jews. Said clearly understands that he is playing with a trope and that the impact lies in this very play. In this claim, he sets in motion a double irony: at the moment he calls himself a ‘Jew,’ he himself is acting as the ‘occupier.’ At that very moment he can no longer claim the mantle of the rootless Jew. In claiming it, he has also forfeited it. Said’s statement and Finkielkraut’s response both reveal the political relevance of the figure of the Jew. Its history—both the history of the Jews and their representation as the other—has become paradigmatic.Whether we like it or not, to speak in the name of the rootless Jew, the foreigner, the victim, is to set in motion an irony; for we annul our right to the position the minute we claim it as our own.To be the last of the Jews, will always mean being the least of the Jews.

Sarah Hammerschlag is assistant professor in the department of Religion at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is the author of The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar France, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010.

Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse

There is a familiar view about Judaism—and specifically its difference from Christianity—that is expressed in the contrast between particularism and universalism. On this view, Christianity is inclusive, embracing all people everywhere regardless of their national or ethnic identity. Judaism, in contrast, is exclusive, a private club for the chosen few. There are Jews as well as Christians who subscribe to this view. Some are embarrassed by our so-called tribalism. Others take pride in our supposed superiority. Sometimes, especially these days, this pride takes the form of a politics that asserts our prerogative and privilege over other groups. But, whatever form it takes, there is a fatal flaw, a tiny ingredient that is missing from this characterization of the Jewish people: its Jewishness.

‘Jewishness’ can mean anything from chicken soup to klezmer to Woody Allen. But when I use the word in the context of this essay I mean something more specific. I am alluding to the fact that Judaism appropriates the story of the children of Israel as told in the Hebrew Scriptures. By ‘the Jewish people’ I mean, in the first place, the group that identifies with the Israelites in the biblical narrative. And by ‘Jewishness’ I mean the quality (or set of qualities) that this act of identification implies.We take it as read that we inherit the mantle of the children of Israel. But how careful is our reading? Perhaps the nuances of the narrative have escaped us and perhaps our identity lies in the nuances. A closer look at the text—plus our relationship to it—subverts the contrast between particularism and universalism; a fortiori, it refutes the view that Judaism expresses the first over the second (or, for that matter, the second over the first, as some commentators claim).

This essay does not offer anything like a complete or comprehensive reading, but it begins to take that closer look. Based on a few scattered passages in Tanakh (principally from Exodus and Deuteronomy), I wish to present the Jewish people in a certain light. In this light, the people are still a particular people: they do not dissolve into an ocean of undifferentiated humanity. But their particularity turns out to be something peculiar. It is not like an ethnicity or a nation—something determinate. In a certain sense, it is more than itself. In another sense, it is never quite itself. Seen in this light, we are (or ought to be) forever scratching our collective kop. A people: but how so exactly? Particularity: but what precisely? These questions are as perennial as the people; and as unsettled; and as unsettling.

To recover this light, let us revisit the place where the Hebrew slaves, after a three-month schlep in the wilderness, find themselves: Mt Sinai.They find themselves, to be precise, presented with an offer from the ruler of the universe, an astute operator who knows how to drive a hard bargain. First, he lures a destitute people out into the wilds and then, on a bare mountain in the middle of nowhere, amid the razzmatazz of fire and smoke and the fanfare of the shofar, he talks up a storm. He makes them an offer that they had to be mad to accept but which they were in no position to refuse. True, they had probably stashed away some unleavened dough. But (to paraphrase Deut. 8:3) man cannot live by matzo alone.As for the manna that had sustained them to this point, God had a worldwide monopoly on its production: if he wished to turn off the supply, all he had to do was say the word. So he seems to have had the children of Israel over a barrel. Be that as it may, Moses presents them with a choice—not once but twice: first at Sinai, shortly after their departure from Egypt, and again forty years later, in the land of Moab, when they are perched on the verge of Canaan. (For the purposes of the argument, I am consciously conflating these two episodes, treating them as two moments of one event: Israel’s entering into a covenant with God.) Moses says to the people:‘I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life …’ (Deut. 30:19). Given that these are the options, the choice rather makes itself. But in choosing life the people get more than they bargained for: they get a brand new identity. ‘Hear, O Israel!’ exclaims Moses, addressing the entire congregation.‘Today you have become the people of the Lord your God’ (Deut. 27:9).

What does Moses mean? He cannot have forgotten that, long before this special day, God had referred to the children of Israel as ‘my people’. He did so when, speaking out of the burning bush, he referred to ‘the plight of my people in Egypt’ (Ex. 3:7) and again when he directed Moses to tell Pharaoh to ‘let my people go’ (Ex. 5:1). For there was an earlier covenant that tied the people to God and God to the people: the one made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. However, the later covenant—the one made with the people—cannot be reduced to the earlier—the one made with the patriarchs; for, if it could, then it would be redundant. Yet nothing is less redundant in the entire Tanakh than the covenant made at Sinai between God and his people. Far from being redundant, it is the necessary condition for the children of Israel to come into their own. At Sinai they stand before God not merely as the descendants of their ancestors but as menschen in their own right. This is the special significance of the second covenant. It is a coming of age, a rite of passage, the collective bar mitzvah of bnei Yisroel. Think of Sinai as an alfresco synagogue, with Moses as the rabbi, addressing the young initiate who has just finished reading his or her parshah. But this bar/bat mitzvah girl or boy is an entire people. So, instead of saying ‘Today you are a man’ or ‘Today you are a woman’, this is what Moshe Rabbeinu says: ‘Today you have become the people of the Lord your God’.

‘The people of God’: the very idea is outrageous. Not only the ultimate chutzpah, it carries a double dose of mortal danger. For a chosen people is a proud people, the envy of the nations. Pride and envy: the one begets arrogance and chauvinism, the other breeds hatred and contempt. None of which is conducive to happiness and all of which sounds depressingly familiar in the chequered career of ‘the people of God’ from that day forth. Now, if you were God, would you wish these things on your favourite people? Then why does God gull the children of Israel with an offer that is a poisoned chalice? And why on earth does he announce to the nations that the Israelites are the apple of his eye (Deut. 32:10)? If he really loves them, why not do his favourite people a favour—and stay shtum?

Unless there is more to God’s partiality than meets the eye. At first sight, it seems as if, with the insouciance of the divine, God reaches down onto the plane of the nations and picks out one—the people of Israel—that happens to catch his fancy, promising them the earth (or at least a portion of it somewhere in the vicinity of the river Jordan). But, on second thoughts, there is something wrong with this picture of events, something missing from this depiction of God: God. God, the ruler of the universe, is not just another petty, despotic, nepotistic, totemistic, Mesopotamian deity, some tinpot stone idol, a god or goddess whose dominion is purely local. ‘For the Lord your God,’ explains Moses to the Israelites encamped in the land of Moab on the outskirts of the promised land, is ‘elohei ha-elohim va’adonai ha-adonim’, the God of gods and the Lord of lords, ‘the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who shows no favor and takes no bribes’ (Deut. 10: 17). Really? Shows no favour? Yet, only two verses earlier, Moses reminds the people of Israel:‘He chose you … from among all peoples’ (Deut. 10: 15). Can a God who shows no favour have favourites? Moreover, in the previous verse Moses points out God this way: ‘Mark, the heavens to their uttermost reaches belong to the Lord your God, the earth and all that is on it!’ (Deut: 10:14). Or, in the words of the psalmist: ‘The earth is the Lord’s and all that it holds, the world and all its inhabitants’ (Ps. 24:1).The dominion of God, who shows no favour, extends to the whole of creation. So, if there is anything to which he is partial it must be the whole; it cannot be one part over and above the rest. God is God of all peoples.Yet Israel is ‘the people of God’? Go figure!

I figure it this way. When God enters the frame, the whole of the frame shudders. If he singles something out, the thing in question, whatever it might be, is not granted a special privilege over and against everything else. Rather, it is raised to a higher power.The part, while remaining a part, is not merely a part: it comes to signify or stand for the whole (which is not the same as the sum). So, on the one hand, when Moses says, ‘Today you have become the people of the Lord your God’, he does not add ‘and you have ceased to be what you were yesterday’.Their brand new identity does not erase the old. Nor does ‘raised to a higher power’ mean elevated to a superior rank. They are still the humble house of Jacob, the ragtag mob that staggered out of slavery in Egypt. On the other hand, today this mob has taken on a meaning. Becoming the people of God, they become a signifier, signifying what it means to be a people, in the full sense of the word, where being a people means meeting the standard God builds into the word.This makes them representative, rather than exceptional, representing the idea of a people, a people that is wholly a people. As such, they are the apple of God’s eye. As such, they are the people of God. Of God, that is to say (recalling and continuing Moses’ invocation), ‘God, who shows no favor and takes no bribe, but upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger’ (Deut. 10:18). If such is God, then being of God means partaking of these selfsame qualities. It means being, like God, partial to the utmost impartiality: partial, in a word, to justice. ‘Justice, justice shall you pursue’ (Deut. 16:20): thus Moses directs the Israelites, calling them out of Egypt, calling them to go from being slaves of the ruler of an empire to being subjects of the ruler of the universe. Raised to a higher power, they are called to a higher standard. Called ‘the people of the Lord your God’, they are called to book. The blast of the shofar, the summons ‘Hear, O Israel’, calls them to the bar of justice. God is a calling; doing justice is the hearing that Israel, being his people, owes the Lord their God.

Why is ‘Jewish’ the Houdini among identities: always escaping the boxes in which it is put?

But he is no more theirs exclusively than they are his exclusively; for then he would not be himself and they would be the people of a god, not God. The choice of Israel is thoroughly inclusive, for they are chosen as an epitome, not as a pet. But why Israel? What makes Israel greater than any other nation? Nothing; that is the point. Not only not greater, but least of all. Consider how exquisite is this choice. God in heaven is seeking a people whose peoplehood is exemplary.As his gaze passes over the mighty empire of Egypt, his eye is caught by a miserable band of wretches who have been downtrodden for generations and have no prior experience of exercising sovereignty as a nation: the obvious choice for the people of God! For God, oddly, it is. Being the lowest of the low makes them attractive to God, who has a penchant for the humble and oppressed.We have seen this in the way Moses emphasizes his concern for the orphan, widow and stranger. We see it again in the assertion of the psalmist that ‘the Lord is close to the brokenhearted; those crushed in spirit he delivers’ (Ps. 34:19) and in the topsyturviness of the just society:‘the lowly shall inherit the land’ (Ps. 37:11).

Could it be that their innocence—their virginity as a nation, their lack of familiarity with self—government— commended them too? Did God regard them as a tabula rasa, a blank political slate, primed to receive the indelible stamp of his two tablets of stone? Absolutely not! Not for one moment does God harbour the slightest illusion about the feckless people he has chosen. As he tells Moses near the end of the forty—year saga, it is inevitable that Israel will let him down and betray their promise: ‘You are soon to lie with your fathers.This people will thereupon go astray after the alien gods in their midst, in the land that they are about to enter; they will forsake Me and break My covenant that I made with them’ (Deut. 31:16).To put it mildly, this people is not distinguished by its outstanding merit, a point that Moses immortalizes in his song, written at the end of his life, a swansong, composed at God’s behest, not exactly a love song, sung ‘in the hearing of the whole congregation of Israel’ (Deut. 31:30), whom he addresses thus: ‘O dull and witless people’ (Deut. 32:6). Not that the enemies of Israel get a better press.They are ‘a folk void of sense, Lacking in all discernment’ (Deut. 32:28). It comes to this: neither better nor worse, par for the course: this is Israel. Fundamentally, they are no different from the rest of their kind: humankind: a typical bad lot.And God knows it.

And yet he chooses them, making the offer of a covenant, calling on them to become ‘a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’ (Ex. 19:6). It is a beautiful idea. But no actual people is—nor conceivably can be—a thing of beauty; not as a people, not as such.A priesthood of priests is one thing, but a kingdom? A holy woman or man perhaps; but a nation? How can an entire people be of God? How can this whole transaction not end in tears? Perhaps the Israelites needed the services of a business advisor when they were made the offer in the wilderness ‘Yes,’ this astute advisor might have cautioned, ‘You are being showered with promises, promises that are practically irresistible, a land of milk and honey, and so on, and certainly they come with a cast iron guarantee from an impeccable source— but on conditions that you cannot meet and with a penalty clause that will strip you of all your assets. Beware!’ But they did have an astute advisor—in the person of Moses. For, not only is Moses completely up front about the penalties, he forewarns them of their fate. He lays out the future before them and it’s grim: they will break the terms of the covenant and lose the whole caboodle. (True, there is light at the end of the tunnel of history, but this is hardly of interest to them in their predicament). He could not be clearer about the disastrous consequences of the offer they have received from God:

I call heaven and earth this day to witness against you that you shall soon perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess; you shall not long endure in it, but shall be utterly wiped out.The Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and only a scant few of you shall be left among the nations to which the Lord will drive you (Deut. 4: 26-27).

So, what the devil is God up to? What the heck is going on in the drama enacted with the children of Israel in the wilderness?

There is something vaguely reminiscent about this drama, an echo of events that took place long, long ago, when the dust had barely settled on a newly—created world. Let me try to bring out some of the resonances. God, who had brought every kind of being into existence after its kind, singled out one, the human, which he made in his own likeness. Being b’tzelem elohim, in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), this chosen being is raised to a higher power vis-à-vis creation as a whole. At this point, the whole of creation is a garden in Eden, a kind of promised land. Being like God, the human couple, Eve and Adam are called to a higher standard.A beautiful idea! But being all too human, they fall short of their billing (which is their very being) and, unable to avoid going astray, do not long endure in their paradise (or their paradise does not long endure: it comes to the same thing), but are utterly expelled, their progeny scattered to the ends of the earth, where they can be found to this day. Sounds familiar? Hearing these echoes of Genesis in Exodus, it is tempting to say that, in the crucible of Sinai, amid the divine fire and smoke, a bit of humankind is remade in the image of God—with the same instantaneous fall from grace as first time round. How human are the people of God! They are just like the rest of their kind! So much so, that in their story every people—even every person—can recognize themselves; they are less a light, more an illuminated mirror to the nations. Sinai, which might have been a reprieve (whether for one people or ultimately for all), turns out to be a reprise of an old, universal story.

This is how the Torah tends to work: it tells a universal story through a particular case: one couple (Eve and Adam), one individual (Abraham), one people (Israel). In each case, the flesh and blood characters in the story seem to transcend themselves—but never by becoming abstrac- tions. A creation is the opposite of an abstraction and the Torah is the book of creation.And also re—creation.Twice in the narrative the children of Israel are presented with the aseres had’vorim, the ten words or commandments: first at Sinai shortly after they leave Egypt and then again in the land of Moab just before they enter the promised land. But with the fourth clause—the commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy—there is a striking difference between the two versions. In Exodus, the reason given is that God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh (Ex.20:11). In Deuteronomy, the explanation is that God freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt (Deut. 5:15). How can this be? Unless the two reasons are ultimately one: unless the second is a reminder of the first, and the creation of the people of God is the re-creation (in some sense) of humankind.

The Jewish people are to the rest of humankind what an instance is to a universal: an example: a case in point: illustrative, not illustrious.

In any case, the outcome of the torrid affair at Sinai is never in doubt for any of the participants. God knows it from the outset, Moses too, and the people are told it in the most forthright fashion. Each party in advance knows fully what lies in store.Yet God (who loves his people) asks of them the impossible; Moses (who led them to freedom) urges them to choose it; and the hapless people, eyes wide open, do.They choose to be what they cannot be. It is an intimate triangle—God, Moses, Israel—with an intricate, indecipherable plot, a paradox on a cosmic scale, a riddle made for eternity. Suffice to say that becoming ‘the people of God’ seals the fate of the Israelites.The rest, as they say, is history.

But whose? One answer lies inside the text, where the story is handed on from book to book, from Moses to Joshua to the judges to the prophets and duly recorded in the annals of Kings and Chronicles.These are chapters in the career of a people inscribed in a book, a book forever closed: a complete testament. But outside, in the world, beyond the pale of the book, where the future is open: whose history and whose fate?

Enter the Jews, a kind of twist to the Hebrew tale. For who are the Jewish people? They are the people who, peering over the lip of the book, espy the children of Israel and exclaim: ‘Look! That’s us: We’re them. See?’ But no one on the page looks back at them—at us—to confirm our view. There is no mutual embrace. It is a one-sided relationship.We Jews might identify with the Israelites, but the Israelites don’t identify with us. They interest us but we don’t concern them.They are too occupied with being themselves, the people in the book. Seen as holy writ, the book is a finished work: it is complete unto itself and set apart in a manner unlike any other text. Here is God’s word, there God’s world, and between them—a gap, a little like the chasm that separates heaven from earth. In the beginning, God divides the one from the other, earth from heaven; which does not mean that there cannot be passage to and fro—think of the traffic on Jacob’s ladder—but it does mean that every rung is a reach. Likewise, passing from Tanakh to terra firma, every step is a trek that is longer than the distance between Egypt and Canaan—even via the route that the Israelites took; it is infinitely longer. (Imagine the Torah suspended forever one tantalizing inch above the tips of your outstretched fingers: this shows how short infinity can be.)

We take Israel’s story to be ours; but it is a take.What is given is the Torah; but how we take it is down to us. Seeing it as given specifically to us, seeing ourselves in the part of the people who receive it in the text, is already a take—for which we bear full responsibility.We have to see it as our choice; if we don’t, then we are certainly not the people of Israel, who become the people of God through choosing. Let us by all means identify with the Israelites, but let us see this for what it is: an act of identification: an act, a doing, and a pretty audacious one at that, identifying with the people of God: a risk we run, a choice: a choice, like the choice that Ruth the Moabite makes when she declares herself to Naomi, saying:‘Your people shall be my people, and your God my God’ (Ruth 1: 16). Seeing the Torah as ours, we receive it; but until we receive it, it is not ours. It is not ours till we take it upon ourselves to see it as given to us.

But we would be well advised to think twice about such an undertaking—just as the people whom we choose to regard as our ancestors, the chosen people, might have been wise to ponder what was on offer to them. For, like them, we run a risk or two. For what are we doing when we assume their mantle? We are inserting ourselves into the intimate triangle at Sinai, with its intricate paradoxical plot, writing ourselves into the middle of a riddle ‘made for eternity’.The awesome complexity of this riddle might be the making of an eternal people—but is liable to be the undoing of a people in time.We say theTorah is given to us; the risk we run is that in taking it we snatch at it and, thinking we get it, lose the plot. Unless we are very careful (which we are not), we end up spoiling the very thing that we say we prize, leaving our grubby paw prints all over the text as we grab it, flatten it, pocket it, plunder it, laying claim to its promises, covering ourselves in its glory—to our lasting shame. In short, we run the risk that every ‘dull and witless’ people runs when presented with an unfathomable gift: becoming a nation of nudniks—just like the biblical people of God. Being like them, we lack ‘a mind to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear’ (Deut. 29:3).

Who are we, what are we, we Jews, wandering from box to box, from people to nation to culture to ethnicity to religion to race (God forbid!), traversing all the known categories, unable to settle into being one thing and not another? Why is ‘Jewish’ the Houdini among identities: always escaping the boxes in which it is put? Because our point of origin is a conundrum.Taking Israel’s story to be ours, we appropriate the name ‘the people of God’. The people (particular) of God (universal): the very idea is a kind of surd: a quantity that does not add up or make sense, a logical scandal, a formula that is always liable to split apart at the seams. When it does, when it splits, its splinters become fragments that fit, more or less, one box or another.We settle for being a nation, religion, ethnicity, whatever.We settle down, finding our niche, knowing our place, fitting in, adding up, making sense.

But suppose this idea, remaining in tension with itself, holds: then something choice comes into being: a people defined by a surd: an absurd people, conceived within the leaves of a book (or the rolls of a scroll) and dedicated to a simple but untenable proposition: that they are both radically apart from the world and thoroughly a part of it. That’s us, the Jewish people. How can we possibly maintain this impossible stand? By taking the narrative of the Israelites and turning it into a stance, a posture towards existence; in a word, an attitude. Not one but three in one: aspiration, the continual striving to be exemplary; atonement, the sorrowful acknowledgement of repeated and abject failure; and hope, a broad hope, hope not just for ourselves but for the whole creation: the stubborn belief in the light at the end of the tunnel that will wipe away all the tears of history from the anguished and wrinkled face of the earth. It is not so much a stance as a step, like the dance of the lightly-clad David, whirling like a dervish before the Ark of the Lord on the road to Jerusalem, (2 Sam. 6:14). Put on the spot, we are always on the hop, shifting from one position to the other, from aspiration to atonement to hope, and back again, constantly, faithfully, religiously. Holding the pose, performing the dance: this is the inner sense of our ceremonies. This, our style, our ritual, is our raison d’être. (If ritual can be empty, it can also be full). Thus we loom in the dark, part light, part mirror, to the nations.

Judaism, on this reading, never solves the conundrum that lies at its point of origin. Christianity does. Parsing a human being into‘spirit’ and ‘flesh’ and substituting the one for the other, it proclaims itself to be ‘the new Israel’, ‘the new people of God’: a people constituted ‘not according to the flesh but in the Spirit’ (Lumen Gentium, Second Vatican Council). With this distinction, Christianity resolves the logical scandal posed by the very idea of ‘the people of God’, converting the people into a worldwide church, a spiritual union, a union via communion. Thus, in effect, Christianity replaces the particular (people) with the universal (church). Judaism does not know a systematic distinction between ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’. It resolves nothing. It is not so civilized. Embracing the scandal at its heart, it insists on the flesh and blood particularity of the people —but aglow in the supernal light that pervades the whole creation. Seen in this light, how can we, the Jewish people, be taken for a normal people? And seeing in this light, how can we possibly keep ourselves to ourselves?

Seen in this light, how do the Jewish people appear? Not altogether steady on their feet. How could we be steady on our feet when we cannot fill our own shoes? How can we fill our shoes when we are never merely or quite ourselves? For there is more to being Jewish than being Jewish.We do not add up.We are a wild thing. Our cup runneth over and, looking slightly the worse for wear, we stagger from point to point, doing our dance, recalling our calling, retelling our tale, preparing to meet our maker at the ends of the earth. Who is our maker? ‘He is bright, he is ruddy; his clothes are red, as when he came from treading the winepress in Edom’ (Anim Zmiros, Song of Glory). It behooves us, being the people of such a God, peering over the lip of his luscious creation and drinking in what we see, always to be a trifle tipsy, perpetually a bissel shikker.

If we stand out, it is only to signify that none of the nations stands above any other. For, seen in the celestial light that pervades the whole creation, the Jewish people are to the rest of humankind what an instance is to a universal: an example: a case in point: illustrative, not illustrious. And if, in some sense, we hold ourselves apart, this is not to keep our distance but, on the contrary, to re-establish our involvement in the here and now, where we belong.What is the place of the Jewish people in the world? In the world, wherever we find ourselves, living in its midst, steeped in its joys, immersed in its tsuris, disquieted by its injustices.A people apart? Only in order to recollect ourselves and, reinvigorated, re-enter the fray of creation, with all our heart, all our soul, all our might.

Brian Klug has written extensively on Jewish identity, antisemitism, Zionism and related subjects. This essay is based on the prologue to his latest book, Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011). Other books include Offence: The Jewish Case (London: Seagull, 2009) and, as co-editor, A Time to Speak Out (London, Verso, 2008). He is a member of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University, Senior Research Fellow at St Benet’s Hall, Hon Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, Southampton University, and Fellow of the College of Arts & Sciences, St Xavier University, Chicago.

It peaked in particularly dramatic fashion just before the Russian Revolution. Less than 5 percent of the total Russian population at that time, Jews numbered over 50 percent of the students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, a demographic feat that produced its own commentary. Students joked that it was the only school in the Russian Empire with a quota for non-Jewish students. In Odessa the situation reached a point of absurdity. With over 80 percent of the student body Jewish, in 1916 the Conservatory officials reacted by launching a novel affirmative action scholarship program for ethnic Russians. Of course, Jewish visibility in a bitterly antisemitic regime had an obvious downside. Charges of Jewish opportunism were common, particularly since a conservatory degree provided a draft deferment and a legal pathway out of the Pale of Settlement. Professional antisemites, such as the music critic Emil Medtner, a leading member of the Russian symbolist movement, spoke darkly of a plague of ‘little Jew boys from Lodz’ ruining Russian and European music with their ‘Asiatic’ and ‘barbarous’ ways. Even well-meaning friends were liable to resort to specious racial explanations for the preponderance of Jewish musical talent. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin once declared that without Jews, ‘music would die out.’ Yet, he went on to explain that this talent stemmed from the biologically feminine character of the Jewish race, which predisposed them to more sensitive, lyrical instruments: ‘For an orchestra to sound right,’ he confided to a colleague, ‘it must have no less than 15 percent Jews in the string and horn sections.’

To explain the special relationship between Russian Jews and music we must return to the man who invented the modern classical music profession in Russia: Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894). Though his name is barely remembered today (and often confused with an equally great pianist of no relation: Artur Rubinstein), in the second half of the nineteenth-century Rubinstein stood virtually without equal as a pianist in Europe, considered by many as the sole successor to Franz Liszt. His colourful, titanic personality and prodigious musical feats inspired George Eliot to write him into Daniel Deronda, in thinly-veiled form, as Herr Klesmer, the symbolic centrepiece of the novel. Born in a shtetl near Berdichev and baptized as an infant, he grew up in Moscow and Berlin. The result was a quintessential European Jewish cosmopolitan, who summed up his own fate thus: ‘To the Jews I am a Christian. To the Christians, a Jew. To the Russians I am a German, and to the Germans, a Russian. For the classicists I am a musical innovator, and for the musical innovators I am an artistic reactionary and so on. The conclusion: I am neither fish nor fowl, in essence a pitiful creature.’
Rubinstein was not only prone to grand statements; he also sought grand solutions to his life’s dilemma. He dreamed up the Russian conservatory as an instrument of artistic emancipation for Jews and Russians alike. His quest to liberate classical music in Russia from its ancien regime legal shackles and Slavic provincialism took a decisive turn in 1862, when he opened the St. Petersburg Conservatory. From its founding, the school enjoyed a reputation as a particularly liberal and tolerant Russian educational institution. And it proved extremely popular with Jews. In the five decades before 1917, they flocked in increasingly large numbers to St. Petersburg and other music schools across the Russian Empire. To these thousands upon thousands of young Russian Jews, music beckoned as a path to European enlightenment and Russian citizenship, crucially one which didn’t demand an abandonment of their Jewishness. Music’s secular universalism required no grappling with dogmatic questions of belief. Nor did it insist on an existential choice about the proper language of expression, the recurring problem for Jewish writers. Besides this cultural neutrality, music’s appeal also stemmed from its continued accessibility as an educational option. When in the late 1880s the Tsarist authorities introduced quotas at universities and institutes to staunch the growing influx of Jews into Russian society, the St. Petersburg Conservatory—along with many of its sister schools around the empire—successfully staved off the new restrictive policy. Women were admitted in equal numbers as well, in stark contrast to almost every other university-level institution in Russia.
That this thin cordon of liberalism prevailed at all is remarkable given its cultural setting. For nineteenth-century Russian music was otherwise a seething cauldron of nationalist brio. However sentimentally we may like to remember the great Russian composers for their Romantic souls and rebellious spirits, many were also unabashed Slavic chauvinists and rabid antisemites, including the likes of Modest Mussorgsky and Mili Balakirev. Before the St. Petersburg Conservatory had barely opened, let alone admitted Jewish students in noticeable numbers, it was loudly attacked as a ‘synagogue’ run by one Rabbi ‘Rebenstein,’ a place where foreign ‘Yankels’ incapable of composing their own national art simply imitated and corrupted Russian music. Russian antisemites continued to voice this canard with increasing volume across the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. More striking, however, is the fact that after 1900 Jews also began to ask whether perhaps the antisemites were correct in their claims. The strange fact of the preponderance of Jewish musicians coupled with the ostensible dearth of Jewish classical music led even Jewish nationalists to lament that Jews had failed to grow their own musical garden. As one St. Petersburg critic wrote at the time, ‘They say that we Jews are the most musical nation, that the violin is our national instrument; we have given the world composers of genius; we have more professional musicians among us than any other people . . . . And at the same time, you will hardly find another nation whose national music has been so much neglected as ours.’
In 1908, a group of St. Petersburg Conservatory Jewish students took it upon themselves to rectify this problem. Their solution was to launch a new organisation known as the Society for Jewish Folk Music. The idealistic collective soon spawned a Jewish national musical movement that spread rapidly across Russia. Its leaders constituted the pride of Russia’s younger generation of composers:
Mikhail Gnesin, Moisei Milner, Joel Engel, and Alexander Krein. Disciples of Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov, friends and rivals of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, these young composers envisaged a modern Jewish music capable of standing alongside the grand national schools of Germany, Russia, Hungary, and Italy. Drawing on the rich folk sources of Ashkenazi Jewry—Hasidic nigunim, Yiddish songs, klezmer dance melodies, and the like—they forged a repertoire of Yiddish lieder, chamber works, choral arrangements, symphonies, and operas.
In the turbulent decade before the Bolshevik Revolution, the Jewish composers of Russia pursued their national mission. In St. Petersburg and Moscow, they formed nonprofit publishing concerns to disseminate their music virtually for free. They sponsored lectures, concert tours, and large-scale outdoor symphony performances, even as World War I raged on around them. And like all the great European Romantics before them, they worshipped at the altar of authentic folkpeople. Hauling primitive phonographs around the Pale, these Russified musicians raced to save the melodies and lyrics of Yiddish-speaking Jews as the world of the shtetl rapidly eroded. Their nostalgic devotion to folklore was matched, however, by a quintessentially modern impulse of reinvention. To save Jewish folk music meant uprooting it from its native cultural terrain. Once isolated, the ‘frozen folk songs’ could be freely recast along modern harmonic and rhythmic lines. More often than not, it was the stylistic conventions of Russian classical music—the late Romanticism of Rimsky-Korsakov, Liadov, and Taneev, the impressionistic modernism of Scriabin—that formed the template for this new genre of Jewish classical music. If Jewish music looked to Russian music for inspiration, the reverse also held true. For one of the most intriguing aspects of the Russian-Jewish musical encounter was the cultural infusion of Yiddishkayt into the heart of Russian classical music. There were, of course, the early flirtations with Jewish folk melodies on the part of Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, and even Glinka, part of their wider foray into Oriental exoticism. But ironically it was during the Soviet period that the sounds of Yiddish folk song and klezmer interpenetrated furthest into the aesthetic fabric of Soviet classical music. The trend began after 1917, as Krein, Gnesin and other Jewish compatriots initially received a surprising degree of recognition and support from the Bolshevik state for their Jewish symphonies, folk song collections, and related endeavours. The best example of this phenomenon is found in the famous friendship between the Soviet Union’s greatest composer, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), and his Jewish doppelganger, Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996). Their relationship reveals the depth of the Jewish imprint on the Russian musical imagination. Shostakovich’s biographers have all puzzled over why this ethnic Russian composer, so sensitive to the Bolshevik political winds, suddenly decided in the mid-1940s to start writing Jewishthemed music. The answer lies in the story of his wartime friendship with a younger Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Poland. During World War II, Weinberg, son of a Warsaw Yiddish theatre composer, sought refuge in the Soviet Union. The two men met in 1943, and from that point on were virtually inseparable. Weinberg came to Shostakovich as a young composer and quickly adopted some key features of Shostakovich’s musical style as his own, particularly the distinctive admixture of modernist textures and folk idioms. At the same time, Shostakovich found in Weinberg’s Jewish background a captivating source of inspiration. From the mid-1940s onward, he began to insert Yiddish melodic inflections, pulsating klezmer rhythms, and Jewish programmatic elements into his works. Over the next few years, both men produced a body of Jewish-themed music, including hauntingly similar settings of Yiddish poetry.
The relationship between Weinberg and Shostakovich was so close and continuous that scholars have often wondered who inspired whom. A case in point is their respective ‘Holocaust’ symphonies. Shostakovich’s 1962 Thirteenth Symphony, subtitled ‘Babi Yar,’ and Weinberg’s 1963 Sixth Symphony, nicknamed the ‘Jewish Violin’ represent two of the most searing musical memorials ever created. Remarkably similar in form and theme (both are five-movement choral symphonies in A minor, with the last three movements performed without interruption), they also constitute parallel portraits of the intertwined history of Russians and Jews. Taken together, the works reveal how resilient and entrenched Jewish musicality remained—as cultural symbol and social reality—in Soviet culture. Indeed, Shostakovich’s symphony, which commemorates the 1941 Nazi massacre of 33,000 Jews on Soviet soil, features one of the most provocative lines to emerge from the mouth of a modern Russian artist. At the end of the first movement, the narrator declares, ‘No Jewish blood runs through my veins, but I feel the corrosive hatred of the antisemites as if I were a Jew, and that is why I am a true Russian!’ Weinberg’s work repays the favour by combining Yiddish and Russian poetry to extol the universal, redemptive power of music, underscored by a dynamic third movement of surging rhythms and violin effects that summon up both the klezmer tradition and the somewhat similar scherzo movement in Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto. The Russian-Jewish musical encounter encapsulated in the friendship of Shostakovich and Weinberg is all the more compelling given the virulent antisemitism and Stalinist terror that overshadowed the middle decades of the twentiethcentury. From the outset, Soviet officials vacillated between the contradictory policies of promoting Jewish music and denying its existence. So too did the statistical predominance of Jews in Soviet classical music prove to be an embarrassment among Communist Party apparatchiks determined to put a proper ethnic Russian face on Soviet culture. The Stalinist anti-cosmopolitan campaign of the 1940s attempted to solve this problem once and for all. Bolshevik cultural officials produced detailed ‘exposeÅLs’ of the Jewish numbers in music, absurdly framed as a Zionist threat to Communist rule. Less laughable were the purges. Stalin’s ‘silent pogrom’ began in 1948 with the murder of actor Solomon Mikhoels, who happened to be Mieczysław Weinberg’s father-in-law and the person responsible for introducing him to Shostakovich. Soon other composers and musicians began to be rounded up. Weinberg’s turn came in February 1953, when he was arrested and accused of a secret CIA-funded plot to launch a breakaway Jewish Republic in the Crimea. Weinberg’s possession of a Jewish liturgical music anthology was taken as proof of his intent to launch the would-be Jewish Republic’s national conservatory along bourgeois, imperialist, and, of course, Zionist lines. Only Stalin’s death a month later ended the anti-Jewish campaign and spared Weinberg his life.
How far did Stalin intend to go in his repression of Soviet Jewry? Even with the benefit of hindsight and tantalising glimpses at formerly secret Soviet archives, it is difficult to say. One thing, however, is clear. In the case of Soviet music, he would have faced a formidable challenge in attempting to disentangle Russians and Jews. Stalin’s own favourite singer was Leonid Utesov, another native Jew of Odessa, who introduced jazz to the Soviet Union and klezmer to Russian popular song. His favourite pianist was Maria Yudina, whose recording of Mozart’s piano concerto (made in the middle of the night after Stalin heard a live radio broadcast and requested the disc be brought to him) was said to be spinning on his record player at the moment of his death. And the prestige of Soviet culture abroad depended in large part on the greatness of genius talents such as David Oistrakh, Leonid Kogan, and Emil Gilels. Year after year, these soloists were trotted out around the world to perform the Russian classics and burnish the Cold War reputation of Soviet culture as a repository of urbane European humanism.
Just as in the Tsarist era, individual Jewish fame did little to resolve later Soviet Jewish vulnerability. But it did suggest the fundamental embeddedness of Jews inside Russian culture. Political, religious, and ethnic outsiders, perennial scapegoats of the regime, Jews nevertheless emerged over time as remarkable cultural insiders and nowhere was this more obvious than in the musical realm. Music was not necessarily less political a cultural arena than literature or visual art in Tsarist and Soviet times. But its political import was not as immediately explicit, its ideological valences less transparent. Even at the most politically delicate moments therefore, the subject of Jewish musicians was somehow less fraught and more palatable to the authorities. Hence nineteenth-century Tsarist bureaucrats sometimes declined to enforce educational quotas on Jewish musicians by reference to the benign character of music (as opposed to commerce and law). Or the notoriously antisemitic, reactionary official who in the wake of the Revolution of 1905 legally approved the formation of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, noting with fondness how he had once heard klezmer music at a Jewish wedding in Odessa.
In fact, all roads eventually led back to Odessa. It was there that the intertwined dreams of Jewish musical fame and Russian liberal cosmopolitanism were born. Even at the height of Cold War tensions between the United States and the USSR, when the political freedom of Soviet Jewry had become a subject of international controversy, the old Jewish musicians of Odessa still beckoned as a nostalgic symbol of the shared cultural past that linked East and West. Witness the famous quip of Russian-born violinist Isaac Stern, who summed up the entirety of Soviet-American cultural diplomacy in the simplest terms: ‘They send us their Jews from Odessa and we send them our Jews from Odessa.’ Isaac Babel could not have said it better.

Now an international phenomenon, the orchestra began life as a small-scale series of music workshops, put together in 1999 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Goethe’s birth. As part of Weimar’s programme of ‘Cultural Capital of Europe’ events, Barenboim was asked to establish a workshop to bring together young musicians from across the Middle East. With the support and interest of Said, Barenboim invited applications from players in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. The response was overwhelming. Speaking at the 2006 Reith lectures, Barenboim recounts:
‘We expected to have a small forum of maybe eight or twelve young people who would come and make music together and spend a week or ten days at a workshop with us, so you can imagine the surprise we had when there were over two hundred applicants from the Arab world alone.’ Twenty-five young musicians attended, alongside a number of established, high-profile performers including cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The workshops comprised chamber music lessons and master classes, and an orchestra that performed Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The name West-Eastern Divan was given, chosen after Goethe’s 1819 collection of poems (the Westöstlicher Diwan) inspired by the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz.
The Weimar ‘experiment’, as Said and Barenboim termed the first workshop in Parallels and Paradoxes, was expressly not designed as ‘an alternative way of making peace’. Rather, Said suggested, ‘the idea was to see what would happen if you brought these people together to play in an orchestra in Weimar, in the spirit of Goethe, who wrote a fantastic collection of poems based on his enthusiasm for Islam.’ Said held that, just as Goethe’s poetry entered into an open dialogue with a cultural ‘other’, so such a workshop enabled participants to explore and traverse those boundaries engendered by difference in nationality, background and political stance: ‘no one felt under any pressure to hold things back. And since the groups were so miscellaneous, both animosity and cordiality were almost always in evidence.’ Barenboim likewise views the venture as creating a new channel of communication and cooperation between assumed antagonists. Speaking in his 2006 Reith lectures, Barenboim states categorically that ‘the orchestra cannot bring peace.’ However, he proposes it can ‘bring understanding. It can awaken the curiosity, and then perhaps the courage, to listen to the narrative of the other, and at the very least accept its legitimacy.’ Music, and specifically the orchestral experience, is celebrated as the ideal vehicle for open interaction. On describing a young Syrian and young Israeli musician sharing a music stand, Barenboim suggests ‘they were trying to play the same note, to play with the same dynamic, with the same stroke of the bow. They were trying to do something together, something about which they both cared… Well, having achieved that one note, they can’t look at each other the same way, they have shared a common experience.’
The potency of this image and its accompanying rhetoric—young Arab and Israeli musicians working as one, letting music soar across political adversity—was not lost on the orchestra’s European hosts. What had been created as a one-off workshop was quickly established (and funded) as a touring orchestra, formed of up to 120 permanent players, drawn from across the Middle East—Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan—and other Muslim countries including Egypt, Iran and Turkey. Since 2002, the regional government of Andalusia has sponsored the group and provides a fixed base for the orchestra in Seville, a development that has led to the inclusion of young Spanish musicians in the ensemble. The orchestra now meets each summer and rehearses in the city before launching an international tour, which often includes live television broadcasts, stadia appearances and recording deals. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’s blend of musical excellence and apparently humanitarian vision has proved a heady mix for liberal European audiences, provoking intense, proselytising excitement among commentators. In response to the orchestra’s various BBC Proms appearances over the past seven years, UK critics have praised the group with a particularly emotive quality of endorsement. Reviews have applauded the orchestra as an ‘astonishingly moving act of creative coexistence’, claiming ‘there is an extra power of passion and motive, of music meaning something’ and that the orchestra’s ‘magic derives from the unique chemistry between its members, its charismatic creator, and the political tragedy to which it is a defiant response’.
Indeed, the idea that the orchestra is uniquely vibrant through a connection to ‘political tragedy’ has been a source of contention for more critical accounts of the orchestra. Some accounts have charged the orchestra with impeding Palestinian solidarity on the international stage through its normalisation of Palestinian-Israeli interaction. Other studies have examined the orchestra’s ideological position by exploring what the ensemble actually offers its players. Various scholars working alongside the orchestra have concluded from their fieldwork that the ensemble seems driven more by young musicians hungry for an opportunity to play professionally (and under the gleaming baton of Barenboim) than by any will to build bridges through music or explore the ‘other’. Indeed, the composer and political activist Raymond Dean has drawn attention to the published collection of West-Eastern Divan player testimonies, An Orchestra Without Borders, noting that the orchestra appears to have done little to enhance the Israeli musicians’ insight into the political realities surrounding them. He suggests, ‘the impression ultimately gleaned from Arabs and Israelis alike is that the real glue binding these young people together is ambition… In itself, of course, there is nothing reprehensible about this—but it is a far cry from stylising the orchestra as an exemplary space of reconciliation and understanding.’

At the forefront of recent critiques is British musicologist Rachel Beckles Willson, who, in a particularly pertinent article, examines not just the orchestra’s players and founders but its administration, patrons and audiences, considering the orchestra as an example of ‘utopian entertainment’. She draws on the film theorist Richard Dyer’s work on musicals and variety shows, which explores how certain musical genres allow audiences an escape from the difficulties encountered in real life: ‘Instead of scarcity these entertainments present abundance, and counteracting exhaustion they express energy; they replace dreariness with intensity, manipulation with transparency, and social fragmentation with community.’ Beckles Wilson proposes that it is on this final reality/fantasy exchange that the orchestra, as constructed by Said and Barenboim, claims to deliver. Through the commonality of musical experience, political foes are supposed to transform into ‘an interactive and productive sociality, in contrast to the destructive conflict that the majority are understood as living out in real life.’ Dyer’s analysis of utopian entertainments goes on to explore how the types of suffering available for transformation tend to be carefully prescribed. Beckles Willson notes that the specific type of suffering defined (and so remedied) by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra—feeling misunderstood by ‘the other’—overlooks the reality of economic and political hardship afflicting many in the Middle East. This recognition only of particular, manageable types of suffering leads to a circularity in problem and resolution: the suffering outlined by Said and Barenboim is that which the orchestra can most aptly relieve.
The question is how far does either this problem or solution relate to the complex issues faced the orchestra’s members and their wider communities? Drawing on Barenboim’s premise that the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is a ‘utopian republic’, Beckles Willson suggests the orchestra‘projects a utopia in Europe and for European audiences, while this is not necessarily one that people in the Middle East seek’. And this projection of utopia is by no means stable or unified. Beckles Willson considers the various and often contradictory utopian visions of the orchestra that she encountered at work among the group’s audiences, patrons, players and administrators. One striking example was a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Madrid, which took place during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. The Madrid concert became a fertile ground for the allocation of meaning, sustaining a number of competing visions as to what the performance was for. Among other claims, the concert was variously appropriated as an expression of broad anti-war sentiment linked to Spain’s recently-ended involvement in Iraq; a platform for Palestinian and Lebanese demonstrators; a site of professional, apolitical music making; and finally, a means of reinvigorating nostalgia in a post-Franco landscape for Spain’s glory days of medieval religious tolerance. The coexistence of these competing agendas goes some way to illustrate how slippery the business of attaching meaning to a musical event can become. Barenboim and Said have made numerous statements about the project’s aims and their wider philosophies of music-making, including many that cite their shared belief in music as a powerful engine of transformation. A closer look at their intellectual positions in relation to music is revealing, and begins to suggest why the orchestra’s performances might present such a fertile site in which to plant a flag.
An outspoken critic of Israeli settlements and military strategy since Rabin, Barenboim’s musical approach has been similarly provocative. He has roundly rejected the ‘historically-informed performance’ movement (where musicians attempt to recreate the performance style of works as they would have been played at the time of composition). Indeed, Barenboim has argued that the tempo of a piece should be chosen not from the composer’s original markings, but from listening and responding only to ‘the content’ Barenboim has rejected the idea of a straightforward fidelity to what a score indicates and instead called for ‘a constant state of interdependency… that you cannot separate, because the speed is related to the content, to the volume etc.’ According to Barenboim, it is only through respect for this interdependency (and the rather mysterious valency of ‘content’) that music finds purpose and expression, a process which Barenboim links explicitly to political activity. He states:
No matter what you think of the Oslo Accord—in other words, it had a chance or it didn’t have a chance—it lost all chance of succeeding when the tempo, the speed at which it was proceeding, became too slow. The music dissipates when it’s so slow, and the process also, because there’s no separation between the different elements… The content requires a given speed and if you play it at the wrong speed… the whole thing falls part. This is what happened to the Oslo Accord.
For Barenboim, music (and music as a ‘magic mirror’ of human action) only bears fruit through a respectful interdependency among parts. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra was created as an embodiment of this vision of music and human action; participating in musical performance requires musicians both to express themselves as individuals and to give themselves to a total and boundless integration. To perform demands the breakdown of ‘separation’ between all musical (and socio-political) parameters. It is an appealing premise. Yet this perspective leads Barenboim to define music in a peculiarly constrained and bombastic way. Speaking at his 2006 Reith lectures, Barenboim stated:
in the West-Eastern Divan the universal metaphysical language of music becomes the link, it is the language of the continuous dialogue that these young people have with each other. Music is the common framework, their abstract language of harmony.
Barenboim draws on the old adage of music as a universal language, accessible but abstract. He claims that by performing classical music as a collective of individuals, Arab and Israeli musicians may share their ‘narratives’, freed from the clutter of political complication by the ‘abstract language of harmony’. Yet to define music thus is sharply essentialist: music is rendered at once all powerful yet curiously blank, defined as connection, but stripped of context. While, for Barenboim, this notion frees music from the politically specific, such an understanding also presents music as an inviting site on which to pin alternative messages and meanings (as found in the various slogans attending the orchestra’s Madrid concert). Yet far from existing in some utopian vacuum of musical communality, Barenboim’s declaration of a ‘universal metaphysical language’ invokes a specific nineteenth-century absolutist account of music. Indeed, the ‘common framework’ of music to which Barenboim refers when discussing his orchestra is very specifically the Western classical canon. While he has been a notable exponent of contemporary music throughout his career, it is striking that the orchestra has made its name principally through interpretations of Beethoven, the poster boy for the German nationalist Romantics. For Barenboim to champion these works may not be problematic in itself, but by framing their performance with the rather shadowy ideology of German universalism, the conductor appears to undercut his own mission. How can open dialogue take place in this culturally constrained setting? If Barenboim wishes parties from complexly different backgrounds to engage with one another’s ‘narrative’ through shared musical participation under his baton, surely the experience is circumscribed by his limited, hegemonic account of what ‘music’ is? However, as a critic for the The Times discovered when reviewing the orchestra’s performance of Fidelio at the 2009 Proms (‘the symbolic integrity of this orchestra and Beethoven’s message of universal freedom overrode any passing vocal flaws’), invoking the universal is a useful way to paper over the cracks.
One might suppose Edward Said—famed for his rigorous scholarship demanding the sociopolitical contextualisation of literary texts—would be a spectacular foil for these types of claim. Said made his name with Orientalism in 1978, which examined how a long history of Western writing has constructed an ‘other’ out of the Orient based on imaginary and amplified characteristics, subsequently used to control that defined as different. According to Said, only by contextualising these statements and locating the power structures that sit within can we begin to unpick their construction and so challenge their dominance. Said’s work has focused on identifying those Orientalist perceptions which are assumed neutral or self-evident, sending up flares to highlight their pernicious and consuming influence. Yet Said made an unlikely exception of music among his scholarly targets, despite being an accomplished pianist. Far from challenging Barenboim’s statements on the function of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and Western music’s universally transformative properties, Said has supported this view. Although he spent his life engaged with the concrete political implications of artistic production, Said’s account of music is oddly decontextualized.
Said believed, as does Barenboim, that the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra could effect positive change by enabling contact and breaking down ignorance between parties. He suggested that music offers an ‘alternative model for the conflict of identities’ and upheld the benefits of participating in another musical culture (here, Western classical music), lamenting the ‘concentration today on the affirmation of identity, on the need for roots… It’s become quite rare to project one’s self outward, to have a broader perspective.’ Musical experience is transgressive: it enables us to flit across boundaries. While Said’s controversial idea of the humanistic mission was to ‘accept responsibility for maintaining rather than resolving the tension between the aesthetic and the national, using the former to challenge, re-examine and resist the latter’, through music his insistence on nationality as a site of contest curiously dissolves. Rather, Said describes a ‘transformation’ in those playing under Barenboim at the 1999 workshops:
‘what you saw had no political overtones at all.’ Said here seems less preoccupied with challenging or resisting nationalist concerns than with praising music’s mystical transcendence.
Indeed, Said has described music as a ‘uniquely endowed site’ with ‘separate status and space’ and commentators have noted Said’s personal, quasi-sacred reverence for Western classical music (Said has himself noted that his conception is ‘romantic’). Rather than the orchestra standing as a ‘contrapuntal’ act, as Said has discussed postcolonial literature and the native appropriation of literary forms, classical music is granted exclusive, apolitical rights that appear to forbid such a cultural dialogue. Indeed, Said and Barenboim have made much of (classical) music’s ineffable, abstract power to foreclose the debate.
While recognising the sincerity of Said and Barenboim’s personal endeavour, I suggest the orchestra functions more as Euro-American fantasy of cooperation and a vehicle for individual musical ambition, than a positive contribution to Middle Eastern social dynamics. The question is what, if any, musical model would better serve this aim? For one, there is the objection to Palestinian-Israeli normalisation, a charge powerfully raised by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (to the vocal consternation of Said’s widow, Mariam). But notwithstanding the issues of Palestinian-Israeli cultural contact, as a starting point I suggest it is an intriguing omission that an ensemble based on Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan—a work devoted to the exploration of Middle Eastern culture—makes no connection to any kind of Middle Eastern music. Said has written persuasively on the ‘false authenticity’ of cementing cultural forms to nation or land, and it does indeed seem crass to suggest musicians ought more usefully to perform music ‘indigenous’ to their region. Yet, it is perplexing that this venture would so resolutely ignore musical forms outside the Western canon.
Various other musical initiatives in the region have explored a wider musical territory. These tend to fall under the radar of international media interest and do not operate across communities. The Israeli Andalusian Orchestra (now disbanded following protracted labour disputes) comprised Russian emigrant musicians and Sephardim who had emigrated from Morocco and performed music from the Sephardi Jewish tradition. Meanwhile, the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music offers instruction in both Western classical and Arabic music to young Palestinians, as well as running the Palestine Youth Orchestra. Following clashes with Barenboim over what the conservatory perceived to be his incendiary comments on Palestinian affairs, the ESNCM has refused funding from the wealthy, Andalusian-associated Barenboim-Said Foundation and operates instead with limited external support (and media interest). While the organisation struggles fi nancially, its local scope and politicised standpoint appears to focus the group’s work more squarely on its community’s own needs and terms. Some of Said’s experiences do highlight the positive impact of exploring a broader range of music. One of the most fascinating anecdotes he recounted from the 1999 West-Eastern Divan workshops concerned an impromptu discussion between some of the Arabic and Israeli musicians, following a clash over who had been allowed to participate in an informal Arabic music improvisation the previous evening. Rather than the depiction of silence and rapture that apparently overtook the musicians during Barenboim’s orchestral rehearsals, it appears this musical interaction, created by the players themselves, led to a heated discussion that stirred up challenging questions on ownership and cultural authenticity for all sides ‘on who could play Arabic music and who couldn’t’. As Said admitted, ‘it was an extraordinary moment.’
Any claim that a musical ensemble can bring meaningful relief to the Israel-Palestine confl ict is clearly a false promise, potentially obscuring the day-to-day material hardships faced by so many in the region. However, the 1999 workshop incident may demonstrate the possibility of more fruitful musical engagement: one generated by those who both participate in the music-making and inhabit the political terrain; one that remains unavailable for international public consumption; and one that seeks to provoke words rather than silence them.

Kate Wakeling is a musicologist and writer. She studied music at
Cambridge University and holds a PhD in Balinese music from the
School of Oriental and African Studies. She is currently a visiting
lecturer in ethnomusicology at Cambridge University.

Just two days earlier, thousands of settlers from the West Bank descended on Jerusalem, all wearing white and wrapped in Israeli flags, dancing in tightly knit circles and chanting biblical phrases. They were celebrating ‘Jerusalem Day’, a national holiday commemorating the so-called unification of Jerusalem in the ‘67 war. For settlers, 1967, rather than 1948, is the true watershed year in Israeli history; and Jerusalem Day is increasingly becoming their Independence Day. And this year Sheikh Jarrah, the current hotspot in the struggle for and against the ‘Judaization’ of East Jerusalem, was a major attraction in their violent pilgrimage.

Until recently, Sheikh Jarrah was a quiet neighbourhood nestled between the Hebrew University’s Mt. Scopus campus and Road 1, a busy highway separating the Eastern and Western parts of the city. However, the neighbourhood’s borderline location makes it a prime target for settler organisations determined to undermine the possibility of dividing Jerusalem into two capitals. Their rationale is simple enough: the Clinton Peace Plan of December 2000 stipulates the outlines for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement in Jerusalem. ‘The general principle,’ it says, ‘is that Arab areas are Palestinian and Jewish ones are Israeli’. By planting small Jewish enclaves within Palestinian neighbourhoods the settlers intend to render the idea of an ‘Arab area’ in East Jerusalem obsolete. They have successfully installed tiny, heavily guarded, Jewish compounds in a ring around the Old City — in Silwan, Ras El Amoud, Jabel Mukaber among other places. Sheikh Jarrah was simply next in line in the plan to create facts on the ground.

In Sheikh Jarrah, however, the settlers’ modus operandi has been different; to understand it, we must backtrack quite a bit into the past. According to Jewish tradition, Sheikh Jarrah is the burial place of Simeon the Just, a high priest during the time of the Second Temple. In the late ninteenth century, Jewish organisations purchased lands and set up a small Jewish neighbourhood around the cave identified as his tomb. During the Arab Rebellion of 1936 most Jewish residents fled the neighbourhood, and in 1948 the area, along with the rest of East Jerusalem, fell under Jordanian rule. The 1948 war gave rise to what is still known as the Palestinian refugee problem, but in 1956 the Jordanian government made a creative attempt to alleviate the situation of a small group of refugees: twenty eight Palestinian families who fled — mainly from West Jerusalem and Jaffa — during the war were offered tracts of land in an olive grove adjacent to the tomb in exchange for their UNRWA refugee cards. They did not forget their former homes but, coming to terms with a new reality, they settled into their new neighbourhood and were refugees no longer.

After Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, these families — the Al-Kurds, the Ghawis, the Hanouns, and the Sabbags, among others — could visit their former houses and fields in Israel after nearly twenty years of separation but even though they were now permanent residents of Israel, they could not reclaim their properties. In 1972 these families were notified that ownership of their new homes in Sheikh Jarrah had reverted to the pre-48 Jewish homeowners, who were now able to lay claim to their former properties. The Palestinian families were ordered to pay rent to two committees which claimed the land, the Sephardic Community Committee and the Knesset Israel Committee, which later sued the families for non-payment of rent. More than sixty years after rebuilding their lives in Sheikh Jarrah, these Palestinian families are now being evicted by court orders obtained by the settler organisation which has bought the land from the Sephardic Committee. Four families have been thrown into the street already and twenty four more await their turn.

At the heart of this legal scandal lies Israel’s Absentee Property Law which officially strips Palestinians of ownership rights over their pre-1948 properties. Jews, however, are free to reclaim possession of pre-48 assets. And this inequality before the law is responsible for the current crisis in Sheikh Jarrah. Now, it should be emphasised that events in Sheikh Jarrah are not very different from countless other injustices perpetrated across the rest of Israel and the Occupied Territories: a massive, sophisticated, state apparatus mobilises behind a group of Jewish fundamentalists in the interests of dispossessing Palestinians. What makes Sheikh Jarrah unique is that many Israelis have rallied, deciding they are simply not going to let this one slide. What began in small solidarity vigils in August 2009 quickly evolved into weekly demonstrations in which hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Israelis renounce Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem.

In December, the Jerusalem police noticed that these demonstrations were gaining momentum and decided to put an end to them. They arrested more than a hundred activists, but the demonstrations kept growing. In fact, in the wake of these arrests, the legality of which had been questioned by the court, more than 4,000 people rallied in Sheikh Jarrah in early March. So the police resorted to a different tactic. Although Sheikh Jarrah is still predominantly Palestinian, the police began referring to it as the ‘Simeon the Just neighborhood’, and claiming that the demonstrations there were a provocation against the neighbourhood’s Jewish residents. Each Friday, they cordoned off the area of the disputed houses, and forcefully drove the protest to a nearby park. When the activists appealed to the Supreme Court, the police chief claimed that the situation in Sheikh Jarrah was simply too explosive to allow political activity. But on Jerusalem Day, hundreds of boisterous settlers flocked to Sheikh Jarrah, and were allowed to demonstrate right in the middle of the neighbourhood. Suddenly, Sheikh Jarrah was not so explosive.

And this brings us back to the May 14th demo. Furious at the police’s politically biased conduct, the Sheikh Jarrah activists walked up to the police barrier and demanded to hold their demonstration where the settlers had held theirs just two days earlier. When the officers refused, they sat down on the road in front of the barrier. They announced that the police’s total disregard for the rule of law justifies non-violent civil disobedience, held hands, and chanted slogans against the occupation. It was clear that the Riot Police was going to crack down on us. But nobody flinched. We knew that this was a fight for the soul of our country, an act of solidarity with the oppressed and the dispossessed, a moral imperative. For more than thirty long minutes, activists were beaten and dragged by stout and livid policemen. Fourteen of our friends were arrested; arms and ribs were broken. But every activist brutally dragged away came right back, battered and bruised, to sit in front of the barrier. We did not make it into the neighbourhood then but we will one day. For it might well be that Sheikh Jarrah is where the future of our country shall be determined. And we will not back down.

Raja Shehadeh is a lawyer and writer who lives in Ramallah. He is the founder of the pioneering, non-partisan human rights organisation Al-Haq, an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, and the author of several books about international law, human rights and the Middle East. His book, Palestinian Walks won the Orwell Prize in 2008. A Rift In Time, Travels with my Ottoman Uncle, will be published by Profile Books in August.

Antony Lerman is the former Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. He is writing a book reflecting on his experience of Zionism and Israel.

I was sixteen when I first met the poet Yehuda Amichai. It was the summer after my junior year of high school. I was still the star of the film of my life, then, and a soundtrack followed me wherever I went. If I’d met Amichai at another moment — even a year earlier, when I was too little formed to be so radically changed; or a year later, when I was already well into my solidification — it’s unlikely that I’d be writing about him now. Or writing at all.
I was traveling across Israel that summer, on a program intended to foster a generation of young Jewish leaders. We saw sights, smoked a fair amount of pot, played a fair amount of the Jewish version of basketball (characterized by a lot of arguing over esoteric rules), and endeavored to couple.
In the course of the summer, we met with an eclectic cast of Israeli figures: politicians, artists, activists, archeologists, soldiers, kibbutzniks and theologians. Our summer’s final meeting was with Amichai. It’s hard to imagine why he agreed to spend time with us. Perhaps the fellowship was paying him. Perhaps it was a personal debt he owed to one of the organizers. Perhaps he actually bought into the premise of the thing, and genuinely believed — as we never could, thank God — that we were Future Jewish Leaders, that his words might redirect us, if only by a few thousandths of a degree, toward some version of Jewish Leadership that he found palatable or even inspiring.
I had never heard of Amichai before that day, and by that point in August had had my fill of imparted wisdom. We were herded into a small, humid classroom: a grid of plastic seats with metal legs and wood veneer, chipboard desks for righties. I was sitting beside a young woman, R, with whom I’d been frustratingly trying to mate all summer. I don’t know to what extent that frustration — that life-affirming, joy-denying, self-making-and-destroying frustration — influenced Amichai’s impact on me, but I doubt that afternoon would have been so important to me if I’d entered the room contented.
I’ve kept exactly one diary in my life, and that only because it was one of the conditions of the Israel program. The diary began on July 6 with these words: ‘I am on a plane heading for Israel. I am sitting next to R. She is beautiful and extremely amiable.’
Four days later, on July 10, I wrote, ‘Last night, R and I talked together on a hill overlooking the Old City. It became clear after a short period of time that we had a lot, in fact almost everything, in common. She is fantastic. I feel 100% comfortable talking to her about almost everything, from our families to music to God. I sincerely hope that our friendship doesn’t end with the summer.’
On July 14, eight days after meeting her, I wrote: ‘R had a minor asthma attack today. We sat next to each other on the bus and I asked her if she didn’t, hypothetically, have a boyfriend, would we be lovers? She thought so, as did I. I won’t pursue it. Maybe I should get my head shaved as some sort of metaphor for this relationship.’
The afternoon of July 29, shortly before meeting Amichai, I came back to the dorms and opened my journal to write in it. I found the following: ‘Dear Jonathan, Don’t worry, I didn’t read your journal. I am sixteen going on seventeen. I hear you on the stairs and I can’t write any more.’
What does it mean to tell someone you haven’t read his journal? That you were tempted to read it, but chose not to? That the thought never crossed your mind, but because journals are so potentially nuclear, you want to set his mind at ease? That in fact you read it, of course you did, but by saying you didn’t, you and he can continue with a charade of mutual ignorance?
She hadn’t read my journal. I was in love with her precisely because she was the kind of person who would not read a journal whose pages were sure to be filled with statements of love for her. Which meant I was never able to state that love to her, because I couldn’t do it in life.
An hour after walking out of that meeting with Amichai, I could remember very little of what he said. Ten years later, I can remember — or feel that I can remember — virtually every word. Impressions usually work in the other direction — they diminish with time. Memory always seems to. Nietzsche said that everything we have words for is already dead. To follow this path, the people we speak to become the coffins for our words. This feels true most of the time. But Amichai was a great exception in my life. I became a greenhouse for his words.
I’ve returned to many, many things he said that afternoon, but one has stood out: ‘I wish there were two more commandments. The eleventh would be: don’t change. The twelfth would be: change.’ (In an only slightly altered form, it wound up in my first novel.) We were sixteen going on seventeen, and he was asking us to always stay sixteen, to always be so frustrated, so unsatisfied, romantic, angered by boredom, inspired by uncertainty, demanding, disappointed and unrealistic. And at the same time to become men and women. That afternoon has changed and stayed the same for me, remained still like a city in a snow globe, while also moving with me into my present, through my fingers and onto this page.

II.

The second time I met Yehuda Amichai was in my sophomore year of college. I was twenty, a long four years older than when we first met. He had come to Princeton to give a reading. In anticipation of his visit, I made a small, sculptural gift for him out of a snow globe I’d emptied and refilled as a kind of surreal diorama. I intercepted him in the hallway, reminded him of our first meeting in Jerusalem, told him how much his words had come to mean to me, and presented him with the gift.
He took the box and nodded. I don’t know what I was expecting, but that wasn’t enough.
‘You can open it now,’ I said.
He removed the tissue paper from the box, and the snow globe from the paper. After examining it from all sides, he said what I thought was a very earnest ‘Thank you.’ And then he put it back in the box.
What was I expecting? I didn’t know. Perhaps if I’d developed a clear image of how I wanted him to respond, I would have been able to dismiss it as preposterous. Instead, I was left with the feeling that he didn’t sufficiently appreciate my appreciation, that the gift hadn’t meant anything to him. He turned and walked away.
At the reading, he spoke with great beauty, and at great length, about nothing in particular. (And not that it matters, but he didn’t repeat a single thing I’d heard in Israel.) I remember the buzz as people left the room. We had witnessed something special, something life-changing and contagious. I can only imagine that many went home to write or have sex.
Among the dozen poems he read that afternoon was, ‘A Man Doesn’t Have Time,’ the poem I had used as my yearbook page upon graduating high school halfway between our two meetings. It’s an argument against Ecclesiastes: we don’t have time for every purpose and so must, in the same moments, laugh and cry, hate and forgive, remember and forget, throw stones and gather them together.
A man doesn’t have time. The easy (and not incorrect) interpretation is that life is short, and so we must pack our experiences tightly, often one atop another. We shouldn’t expect the seams to hold.
But I like to think he also meant something different, more nuanced. Man doesn’t have time because he exists outside of it, changing and unchanging, always returning to his past and engaging with his future. We were never 16 going on 17. We were 16 going on 16, and 3, and 77. In 2000, 5 years after I gave him the snow globe, Amichai died at 76 years old. There was still one more meeting ahead of us.

III.

My first son was born on January 25, 2006. The following January, my family moved to Berlin for four months. While there, I gave a phone interview to an Israeli journalist, on the occasion of the Hebrew translation of my second novel. As we were getting off the phone, she said, ‘I almost forgot. One more thing. Do you know any Israeli literature?’ Among the writers I mentioned was Amichai. And for whatever reason, I then told the story of the snow globe I’d given him. It was the first time I’d mentioned it to anyone, as it felt so unimportant, and there was something embarrassing about the imbalance of regard. I’d spent hours making the thing, and rehearsed what I wanted to tell him. He received it with a nod, and for all I knew, proceeded to toss it in a garbage can.
A few weeks later, I received this e-mail:

Dear Jonathan,
Please let me introduce myself: my name is Hana Amichai and I am Yehuda Amichai’s widow. I read your interview in the Israeli paper Maariv, and was very moved by your words on Amichai. I wanted to tell you that he brought home your glass object, saying he got it in one of his readings. My children liked it and got hold of it. I do not know where it is now.
Thank you,
Hana Amichai

Two years after that, I returned to Israel, this time as a professional writer participating in a literature festival. My wife and I spent an afternoon with Hana at her home in Jerusalem. We ate almond-stuffed dates in her living room, drank cappuccino from her new machine, had the history of our view of the Old City explained to us, heard the story of Amichai’s death. I kept thinking some version of, Why didn’t I know then what I know now?
Why didn’t I write him letters? Why didn’t I insist on another meeting, which could have been done easily enough. (I’ve since heard of a number of people who got to spend time with him this way.)
Why didn’t I realize that he wasn’t going to live forever?
Because I was too young? Because he did live forever?
R, who is one of my closest friends, wrote me the following in 2004, ten years after I met her on the plane to Israel: ‘But still, I find myself not quite happy, but invigorated, realizing that while I might not leave the world a better place, I am, everyday committed to acting like I can. This fills me with a bigger-than-myself swelling, the swelling that has been keeping me up at night: the world never seems to get dark enough for me to sleep easily these days.’
Did Amichai meet with us that afternoon because he wanted to leave the world a better place? Is it ridiculous even to wonder such things? What motivated his writing? Why did he meet with us that afternoon in Israel?
My first son is named Sasha, after my wife’s grandmother. In a few weeks he will be three years old. One week ago today, my second son was born. We named him Cy Amichai Foer — Cy for my wife’s grandfather, Amichai for the poet. A good friend of ours, who was a good friend of the poet’s, sent us a book of Amichai’s, which Amichai had inscribed to him: ‘For Leon / with love, Amichai.’ Below this inscription our friend wrote: ‘For Amichai / with love, Leon.’ I’ve never encountered a more powerful expression of the declension of life, the generational giving and taking, the reading and writing of each other that has no beginning or end, yet is all the time beginning and ending. The book’s title is Time.

The Snow Globe is reprinted from Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, edited by Elizabeth Benedict (Free Press/Simon & Schuster). Copyright (c) 2009 by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Jonathan Safran Foer is appearing at Jewish Book Week 2010. www.jewishbookweek.com

In short, Renaissance humanism grew out of the revival of the latke, so prominent, though needing to be rediscovered, in the Golden Age of Rome, even before the decline of virtue and strength in her citizens.And what of the hamantash? It, too was rediscovered, in the Hamatus,which means ‘furnished with a hook,’ or ‘hooked.’ Some of the humanists were indeed hooked on the hamantash, especially those who read Lucius Appuleius and who found the Hamus, denoting a kind of pastry, in his Metamorphoses. But the literature associated with the hamantash in antiquity is far less rich than that of the latke, and its texts are primarily of Silver Age origin. Indeed, the Metamorphoses of Appuleius are better known by the title of The Golden Ass,which is assuredly not aristocratic or especially nice.Most humanists voted with their stomachs, not their seats, and with their classical tastes for the latke and would have nothing to do with the Golden Ass,as you should not,prunes or no prunes.Only someone like Pico della Mirandola, who was pretty much an adolescent and a syncretist to boot,became a hamantash addict.He liked to mush dissimilar things around together. The hamantash fit his taste for emblems and his puerile notions of magic and mysticism and the unity of knowledge and the poppy or mommy seed in the midst of the carapace within which the boring nub of universal truth might be found and consumed.This is known as Renaissance Neoplatonism, and you would be well-advised to give it short shrift.
But the tradition of the latke and its role in the unfolding of the Renaissance is of a different order. Here let me turn to Machiavelli and to the important revelation that emerges out of reading his work by the light of the classical latke scholarship that he inherited from his Quattrocento predecessors.
To Machiavelli, the relevant word was latta.That was perhaps because he spoke with a very heavy Italian accent — not surprising,perhaps, in view of the fact that he was Italian and wrote in Italian, too, and also because he liked to spend all day fooling around in a country café during his exile to Settignano, where all they had was Chianti and latke.The rustics there taught Machiavelli to call it that; the word means a tin plate or a thin plate or a slap or the crushing of a person’s hat when you slap him on top of it. So it is quite relevant to the latke, and you can see it in not only the object,but also the way in which Machiavelli and his companions sat around and ate latkes and slapped each others’ hats before calling for more.Machiavelli was not genteel. In coming to the discussion of Machiavelli, I should emphasize that although he was a latke man, he has to be analyzed like a hamantash.This, among other things,makes him quite unusual.An example of such an analysis, although incomplete and basically inadequate, may be found in the work of the University of Chicago’s own Leo Strauss, learned also in Jewish philosophy, entitled, Thoughts on Machiavelli. Strauss really went to town in pointing out that Machiavelli may never mean what he says; that the external surface hides a different meaning within, that he is master of deception, citing the letter to Guicciardini in which Machiavelli writes, ‘For some time I never say what I believe and I never believe what I say; and if it sometimes occurs to me that I say the truth, I conceal it among so many lies that it is hard to find out.’ Strauss must also be credited with opening up a splendid line of investigation in his theory of silence,which states, roughly, that it is all very well to read the words on the page but what you should really be looking for is what the author does not say. That is where the true meaning is to be found: ‘The silence of a wise man is always meaningful.’ Here, indeed, we have the key which Machiavelli scholars have ignored.
There are a lot of things about which Machiavelli is silent. Let us examine the internal evidence. He never mentions his mother. He never talks about cooking.He is silent about Hanukkah.The old deceiver, so fond of posing extreme alternatives and then coming down resoundingly on the unexpected side, never poses the antithesis of latke and hamantash.What does all this add up to? You’ve guessed it. Machiavelli was Jewish — his silence makes that crystal clear. Not only was he Jewish, he was like all wise people, for the latke. I suppose you probably feel, as I do, that I have said enough to show that the Renaissance problem is no problem at all and that Machiavelli is perfectly comprehensible once you understand the that his conception of virtù in history and politics is grounded in the revival of the Roman latke, flat, juicy, and oval like the Roman Republic he so admired.
It is fitting to contribute these conclusions to the world of scholarship at the time of our university’s centennial, its celebration of learning, and its renewed commitment to complicating the uncomplicated, as it has done for a hundred years and will do relentlessly in the century to come, pursuing and disseminating the truth and the joy of discovery wherever they may be found

So when Romeo sees Juliet he loves her immediately, and soon says, ‘By yonder blessed mohn I vow.’
She softly answers: ‘O swear not by the mohn, the inconstant mohn … lest thy love prove likewise variable.’ She does not know how to bake hamantashen and is trying to warn him away from his fatal obsession.The stage for tragedy is set.Truly, there ‘never was a story of more woe that this of Juliet and her Romeo.’
We begin to see a pattern in Shakespeare’s plays.When we note that the Dark Lady was the inspiration of his sonnets, the final clue to the secret of Shakespeare’s power emerges.
‘Dark’ is the perfect word for the filling in a hamantash: it is black and it is hidden within baked dough. Mohn is made of poppy seeds (masculine, of course, or else it would be made from mommy
seeds), but the other hamantash filling, prunes, is feminine; only women eat them, usually old women with irregularity. Thus the Dark Lady has two meanings — an absolute prerequisite in all literary criticism.The Dark Lady stands for Shakespeare’s two favorite dishes — hamantashen and his constipated old mother. These were the twin sources of his inspiration.
For a few remaining skeptics, there is the sonnet of Shakespeare’s, newly discovered, stamped on the skin of a kosher salami. It is Shakespeare’s final testament, his Lost Sonnet:

Shall I compare these to a hot latke?
Thou art less fattening, more digestible,
While heartburn is the latke-eater’s lot
(A fatal fact quite incontestable).

Consumed by that which he was nourished by,
The glutton soon cries out in vain, ‘Surcease,
And then his appetite and he both die
As martyrs to an overdose of grease.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Immortal poppy seed,O Hamantash:
The gourmet’s appetite thou ne’er dost jade
When happily he has thee for a nosh.
Thy taste a taste of heaven must foretell.
While slippery latkes line the road to hell.

I have some contradictory responses to Uri’s paper, which is a powerful examination of possible ways in which victimhood, scapegoating and sacrifice are pushed from one group to another, so seeding murderous aggression and oppression. For Uri, a Jewish sacrificial history is the source of the treatment of Palestinians: he calls it ‘the itinerary for the new ‘korban’ and lists it as ‘first exile’ – the Naqba – ‘then ghettos’ –Gaza – ‘then holocaust’. ‘Surely a full-blown Palestinian holocaust is part of the unconscious itinerary,’ he writes, taking the ‘process of sacrifice conversion’ as necessary to the maintenance of Israeli statehood, and running this together with the history of the Jews as victims, as sacrifices. The destruction of so many Jews in the Holocaust and then in the struggle to found the State has hardened Israel away from compassion for its own people as well as for those it sees as its enemies; the ovens that burned the victims of the Holocaust became the furnace that melts ‘different metals’ to ‘form a new, particularly hard, homogeneous metal.’ Loss is read as sacrifice for the sake of something else — the survival of the people, the creation of the State — and in an economy of despair this also requires a different sacrificial object, a dehumanised other (the lamb) in place of the beloved son. This substitution, new sacrifice for old, is being enacted in Israel-Palestine along the same lines that such mental substitutions (displacements, condensations) are found in dreams and nightmares, in the unconscious of any individual. Palestinians thus become not so much the hated human other as the dispensable non-human, the animal which can be blithely killed because it stands in the place of the sacrificed. No longer the descendents themselves of Abraham and hence a brother-group to the Jews, Palestinians lose their stake in humanity.

My response to this is akin to the one generated by Levi’s original comment — ‘What have we done? What terrible thing have we become?’ But I am also put off by what Uri does in the paper, by its determinism, which, however seemingly justified it might be by the appalling realities of what is happening in Israel-Palestine, occludes those invitations to openness that reside both in Palestinian agency and, ironically, in Jewish life itself. Something has gone awry here, I think, or feel; something is of course awry in reality, in the obfuscations and denials with which murderous aggression is covered up, and in that aggression itself; but I also feel there to be something awry in the perspective that Uri takes, that leaves me troubled and unsure, despite wanting to agree with him and learn from him. This might be simply a wish that things would be different or a narcissistic wound on my part connected to the pain and responsibility for damage that accrues to being Jewish in the context of Israel, which Uri’s paper reveals so powerfully. But I wonder if it could also have to do with a failure in the paper to distinguish between Israel and Jews, a distinction which is still difficult to make (Jews pray for the well-being of the State of Israel in the synagogue service and most still support its existence as a ‘Jewish state’), but which is historically significant and currently may be opening out again (as testified to by organisations such as Independent Jewish Voices). Linked to this is my own, diasporic, refusal to buy into the reading of Jewish history as inevitably leading to the Holocaust (‘first exile, then ghettos, then holocaust’ is Uri’s précis of this history) and hence to be a story of suffering only justified by the establishment of the State. This is the standard Zionist account of Jewish history, one I suspect that is not shared by Uri, but that is reproduced in his paper as the psychic origin of the ‘process of victim conversion’. What is assumed by this is that the only way Jews will escape their fate as victims and sacrifices is to find another people to take it on in their place. ‘Today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.’ And on top of this I want to assert something else: despite the failure of Hebrew to distinguish between victims and sacrifices, these are not the same thing: victims are not sacrifices, in the sense of always being offered up in order to achieve some greater end; much more often, they are just victims.
Whilst Uri’s paper seems to focus on Jewish experience, I have a troubled sense that it comes from somewhere else, from a place in the Israeli psyche that struggles to acknowledge other perspectives. Again this is not an accusation of failure, but rather an attempt to understand what it is like to be immersed in a national culture dominated by narratives of history and survival that are so strong as to make it exceptionally difficult to step outside them, to imagine another terrain. For example, in this paper, even in its act of expressing solidarity, the Palestinian other is made invisible by not being imagined as a source of agentic subjectivity: as Uri says about Nathan Alterman’s poem, ‘The Palestinians [are] simply not present, not even as an agent of death, not even as a hostile other.’ The Palestinian is positioned as victimised other to the Israeli Jew, but always from the point of view of the Israeli Jew; that is, what one might call the ‘voice’ of the Palestinian is left unheard. I am not going to dwell on this, because my own position as a British Jew leaves me even more bathed in ignorance, and my capacity to make this imaginative leap is far more limited than is Uri’s. I am rather trying to acknowledge a difficulty here: that one speaks from where one is, as if one speaks the truth; but the other as human subject is deeply elusive, and in many situations — including and especially the one we are dealing with here — this is not an abstractly philosophical issue, but one with consequences. Uri is writing about and to the Israeli Jewish psyche, which to some extent justifies his focus; and I am trying to think about this writing from outside that place, and can see an absence, which I cannot fill.
The exclusion that implicates me more strongly, however, is a more surprising one: seeming to be about the Jew and the impact of Jewish history, the paper, in an odd way, loses the Jew as subject. Of course this is a complex issue. Uri’s paper calls on Jewish identity, and it draws on the traumatic experiences of European Jewish history to make its point. It shows the dead hand of the Holocaust lying on the Israeli imaginary; it references the Zionist running-together of the Holocaust and the founding of, and need for, the State of Israel; and behind that a consciousness of Biblical imagery, of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac, and a notion of sacrifice and substitution that is taken as emblematic of Jewish history. But to my mind the perspective is distorted by its embeddedness in that same Zionist myth that it tries to deconstruct. Jewish culture and history is written off in the same way that Zionism itself writes it off, as if all Jewish history is a precursor to Zionism and hence all the destructiveness of contemporary Israeli society is the endpoint of developments since Biblical times. Uri writes of Jewish diasporic history in the apocalyptic terms used by Zionists who see the future of the Jewish people as lying solely in Israel: ‘first exile, then ghettos, then holocaust.’ As rhetoric this is precisely the way Zionism establishes its hegemony amongst the Jewish people; and it is a common Israeli account of the poverty of the diaspora, reproduced even by such supposed ‘doves’ as A.B. Yehoshua in his May 2006 assertion that only Israel can save the Jews. As history, cultural awareness and ethics, however, it is actually a travesty.
I am not suggesting, of course, that Uri himself is unfamiliar with both the difficulty and the political uses of this kind of discourse; rather, that in its use of the Zionist version of Jewish diasporic humiliation and tragedy — a use which buys into the discourse at the same time as it laments it — this paper presents too deterministic an account of what the Palestinians might mean for the Jews (I use the term advisedly) and of what alternatives to oppression might be found in Jewish ethics and history. Additionally, if one can descry two such moments of narrowness in the piece (Israel-centredness that obscures Jewish diasporic experience and Palestinian subjectivity) perhaps there is also a third that supplies its unwarranted epistemological background: the psychoanalysis is also formulaic — as if each victim has to pass on its victimhood to another. Even if one can accept the controversial notion of an ‘historical unconscious’ in which psychoanalytic narratives of defensive individual processes are deployed to explain a historical and social phenomenon, one has to ask about the rigidity of the mechanism that is being claimed.  ‘This move away from the victim position,’ writes Uri, ‘involves the positioning of a replacement victim, a sacrifice, all in the same concept.’ But why? Can nothing ever change? Is it always impossible to work something through?
We can learn a lot from terminology, from the harmonics of words. In a passage that Uri references but does not quote — reading it as a revelation of how the ‘sanctifying of the holocaust is… our blind spot’ — Agamben carefully and bitterly analyses the history of the term ‘holocaust’, which he sees as applied against the Jews, to justify extermination as a sacrificial act. Agamben argues that the notion of ‘holocaust’ is ‘essentially Christian’ and in particular was used in polemics against the Jews. Contrasting the use of ‘Holocaust’ with the term ‘Shoah’, which also means ‘devastation, catastrophe’, Agamben comments:

Even if [Primo] Levi probably refers to this term [i.e. ‘shoah’] when he speaks of the attempt to interpret the extermination as a punishment for our sins, his use of the euphemism contains no mockery. In the case of the term ‘holocaust,’ by contrast, the attempt to establish a connection, however distant, between Auschwitz and the Biblical olah [sacrificial act] and between death in the gas chamber and the ‘complete devotion to sacred and superior motives’ cannot but sound like a jest. Not only does the term imply an unacceptable equation between crematoria and altars; it also continues a semantic heredity that is from its inception anti-Semitic.

Agamben refuses to use the term ‘holocaust’ because of this, and despite its prominence and ubiquity I would prefer to do the same: ‘holocaust’ suggests a fire-offering, precisely the sacrifice that Uri refers to. But this is a backward-looking argument, from the perspective of those who wish to see the Nazi extermination as either a meaningful consequence of sinful acts (the despicable perspective that some religious commentators have taken on it) or a necessary precursor to what came afterwards (the hegemonic Zionist discourse). Whatever the political traces (there is little doubt that support for the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state was enormously enhanced by people’s realisation of the extermination of Jews in Europe), the Shoah was not a ‘sacrifice’, it was, precisely, a ‘devastation, catastrophe’. Those who died did not give up their lives in order to achieve something, either to appease an angry God or move the politicians and state-makers; they were, simply, killed. The link is ideological; no-one wants or needs the sacrifice, they just make use of it for their own ends. This also means, I think, that we should not see the Palestinians as the displaced sacrificial lamb of the Jews: this justifies oppression, it says to the Israelis, ‘because of your history, you cannot help but treat others as victims, sacrificing them to your own cause.’ One dangerous response to this might then be, ‘Too bad, one has to do what one has to do to survive.’
Of course I am not suggesting that Uri buys into this, only that the critique his paper develops may reproduce rather than challenge the Zionist account of Jewish history and consciousness. If this is right, and the pessimistic determinism of the ‘exile-ghetto-holocaust’ narrative is to be opposed, what alternatives does it open up for us? First, this narrative is history written in reverse. For much of the period of ‘exile’, Jews lived among others precariously, for sure, as a consequence of Christian antisemitism, but also creatively and in a settled way. The great Jewish civilisations of Spain and Poland are examples; the thriving Jewish mercantile cultures of the Mediterranean and north Africa are others; and the explosive presence of secular Jews in nineteenth and twentieth-century European culture a third. The point is, despite Jewish suffering this is not simply the story of a victim nation that can only survive by casting its victimhood elsewhere. The alternative story to draw on is one of learning, ethical striving, relational complexity and at times openness to others; why should it not be these more ‘hospitable’ elements of the Jewish past that are brought into the present? Only from a perspective of a self-justifying Israel-centred discourse in which diasporic history becomes solely the story of prolonged death and persecution does it look like we cannot escape the status of potential victims.
Secondly, the choice of founding narratives is important. Uri is right to point to the significance of the Akedah in Jewish thought. Jews read this passage on the second day of Rosh Hashanah as a reminder of the trials of faith and a message about the possibility of reprieve. On the first day, however, they read the passage immediately before this one, in which Ishmael and his mother Hagar are cast out by Abraham. In this story, Hagar gives up on the boy and abandons him to die, only for the angel (who reappears in the Akedah) to step in to rescue him. These are parallel tales: they do not have the same valency, and it is definitely the case that Isaac is preferred; but they nevertheless have a similar structure in which the violence of the father towards his sons is tempered by the angel. Should we read this merely as the beginning of a prolonged history of bloodthirsty sacrifice? As scholars have often noted (and Robi Friedman points this out in the paper to which Uri refers), the shock of the Akedah is such that Sarah dies and Abraham loses the capacity to talk to God or to his son; that is, he may be rewarded but he is also punished, his sacrificial zeal is too much for him and his family. Ishmael wanders in the desert, and seems to be cast out; but the Jewish tradition is that after the death of Sarah, Abraham remarries Hagar, and Isaac and Ishmael are reconciled, coming together to bury their father when he dies. This is a story not only of sacrifice, which I am not denying is present in it; but also of loss and reconciliation, an attempt to put aside deeply felt conflict, bury the past and move on. We should also note here that in the Koran, the story of the Akedah is very similar — but there is one highly significant difference. The son with whom Abraham is tested is not Isaac, but Ishmael; and the reward given to Abraham for his faith is, specifically, the gift of another son, Isaac. That is, the sacrifice is tempered by generosity: the forefather of the Jews as a gift that comes about through the ancestor of the Muslims. Why, when drawing on these kinds of narrative for our histories of the psyche, should we constantly miss their humanising possibilities, in which, for example, from both religious perspectives Ishmael is not the inhuman other to the Jew Isaac, but actually the brother?
Let me try to make it clear again that I am not trying to reduce the terror and outrageousness of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, nor the complexity of the Israeli imagination in terms of its own fears and repetitions as they are played out in relation to the dehumanised other. Much of what Uri says about this is too clearly true to be repudiated. But I think what happens in the use of psychoanalysis as only a study of trauma and its reproduction, and in the rendering of Jewish history from the point of view only of Zionism, is that we are left with no resources with which to battle our burning memories, with which – if you like – to burn them in the sense of disposing of them so we can live anew. If we are to move out of this terrible morass, we have to find alternative narratives both from within the Jewish and Israeli traditions and from that of the Palestinians, in which the focus is not on sacrificing ourselves or others, but rather on what can be brought together, what hospitality is possible.
I agree, to echo Uri’s closing words, that we must ‘liberate ourselves from the throes of the holocaust and sacrificing logic,’ but we cannot do this by repeating that logic over and over again. A first step is to set aside the notion of victims as sacrifices: there is no such justification for their suffering. A second step is to look for those traces and contradictions in our apparently seamless stories of how we become what we are, and to disrupt these stories in the name of a more open set of possible relations. And maybe a third is to do something that I have singularly failed to do here, which is to spend less energy on reconstituting our own justificatory narratives, and to try to involve ourselves in the founding stories and narratives and ethics of others.

Stephen Frosh is Professor of Psychology and Pro-Vice-Master at the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College.

This article was originally published in the independent online magazine www.opendemocracy.net.

It had struck us, and not surprisingly many others at around the same time, that the category of the ‘Jew’, not the history of Jews, Judaism or Jewish culture, but the way in which the ‘Jew’ had been perceived in modern culture, was relatively unexplored. While issues surrounding race, identity, colonialism, and Eurocentrism have become the focus of endless debate and scrutiny, the ‘Jew’ had largely been left out. It is as if the issue of the ‘Jew’ is just as much an embarrassment to contemporary cultural theorists as it was to their European ancestors.¹

These may seem puzzling remarks, coming as they do just two years after the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington officially opened its doors in April, 1993. As Karyn Ball has observed, for many people ‘the Museum was a sign that Jewish identity politics had succeeded in securing the privilege of Jewish interests in obtaining a national recognition of the Holocaust as a singular trauma and of the Jews as the “world’s greatest” historical victims’². Yet still these editors considered the ‘category of the “Jew”’ to have been oddly excluded from the fashionable era of identity politics, as if ‘an embarrassment to contemporary cultural theorists’.Their use of the word ‘embarrassment’ is striking. Is this embarrassment exclusive to cultural theorists or might it also pertain to Jews (or Jewish cultural theorists) themselves? For the Jew within the academy has been a prolific figure, even if not an explicit one, as if Jews themselves did not quite know how to represent themselves, but would rather hide behind the mask of anonymity. What seems on the surface to have been an immense cultural achievement for this particular minority may even, paradoxically, have led to a greater obscurity. For the polemical language of other groups (talk, for example, of black or gay pride or woman’s empowerment) would likely provoke Jewish embarrassment. It is, after all, precisely from these kinds of allegations (of ‘pride’ or of ‘power’) that Jews have usually preferred to keep their distance.
To determine how the ‘“Jew” has been perceived in modern culture’ it’s worth beginning with Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 work, Réflexions sur la Question Juive, pugnaciously written with the aim of addressing an embarrassing subject that no one else dared mention. In the immediate aftermath of the war, when Jewish survivors were returning to their homes in France, Sartre reflected on the French newspapers’ omission of any reference to the Jewish war experience:

Does anyone think that the Jews […] don’t understand the reasons for this silence? Some of them approve, and say: ‘The less we are noticed, the better.’ Can a Frenchman, sure of himself, of his religion, of his race, possibly understand the state of mind that dictates such a statement?³

Sartre’s book offers a psychological and sociological analysis of two related social phenomena: the anti-Semite and the Jew (Anti-Semite and Jew is the title of the book’s English translation). In the first case, Sartre sets about critiquing and laying bare the prevailing climate of specifically French anti-Semitism with recourse to two distinct personality-types, ‘the anti-Semite’ and ‘the democrat,’ each of whom, Sartre argues, for different reasons, would rather the Jew disappeared. In the second case, and more controversially, Sartre’s book undertakes to explain what he calls the Jewish ‘state of mind,’ by distinguishing, in this sphere, between ‘inauthentic’ and ‘authentic Jews’. Concentrating primarily on the former, Sartre reveals how the inauthentic Jew proves to be indispensable to his (both the anti-Semite and Jew are typically male for Sartre) own disappearance by colluding with the wishes of his persecutors — ‘the less we are noticed, the better’.
At a time of overwhelming vulnerability a great many Jews were thrilled to have such a popular and influential defender as Sartre. Claude Lanzmann later recalled the profound effect the book’s publication first had on him: ‘I remember, I walked the streets differently, I could breathe again, because the simple fact that the war was over had not changed the way one felt inside’4. And Alain Finkielkraut recalls how, ‘[w]ith unimpeachable rigour he told me that I was an authentic Jew, that I assumed my condition and that courage, even heroism were required for me to claim so loudly and so strongly my ties to a people in disgrace’5. Sartre’s position was that only the Jew who publicly claims to be a Jew can be deemed authentic. Authenticity was also a key term of his existential philosophy:

Authenticity […] consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of [one’s] situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks that it involves. [90]

Yet, despite some initial enthusiasm, it is, for the most part, Sartre’s Jewish readers who have since had the more troubled relationship to his text. For one thing, Sartre’s Jew has an entirely negative determination. The Jew, according to Sartre, is a man ‘whom other men consider a Jew’ [69]. It is ‘the anti-Semite who makes the Jew’ by projecting him as a figure of hate in order to shore up his own positive identity (his nation, his religion, his race, &c). Sartre does not consider Jewish religion, ethics, culture or tradition to have anything more than a superficial role to play in the modern Jew’s identity. Jewish history, for Sartre, ‘is the least historical of all, for it keeps a memory of nothing but a long martyrdom, that is, of a long passivity’ [67]. Nor, therefore, do the Jews have a future, and any future liberation of mankind would not include the Jew, as a positive feature, within it. As such, the Jew’s presence is entirely spectral:

We must now ask ourselves the question: does the Jew exist? And if he exists, what is he? Is he first a Jew or first a man? Is the solution of the problem to be found in the extermination of all the Israelites or in their total assimilation? Or is it possible to find some other way of stating the problem and of resolving it? [58]

A Jewish readership might well be vexed by this re-statement of the Jewish question from the lips of a purported defender. For Sartre’s criticism of both the anti-Semites (who see only the Jew and not the man) and the democrats (who see only the man and not the Jew) is aimed, precisely, at their failure to resolve the Jewish problem. Both are at fault, says Sartre, because by seeking to obliterate the Jew they bring him back into existence. Sartre’s defence of the Jew therefore amounts to little more than an apology: if the Jew exists then he is not to blame for it. Although the inauthentic Jew is partly culpable, for he,

has allowed himself to be persuaded by the anti-Semites [...] He admits with them that, if there is a Jew, he must have the characteristics with which popular malevolence endows him, and his effort is to constitute himself a martyr, in the proper sense of the term, that is, to prove in his person that there are no Jews. [94-5]

Sartre, meanwhile, has his own solution to the Jewish problem:

[W]e must accept him. And if that acceptance is total and sincere, the result will be, first, to make easier the Jew’s choice of authenticity, and then, bit by bit, to make possible, without violence and by the very course of history, that assimilation to which some would like to drive him by force. [147]

For it stands to reason that if Jews are only Jews by virtue of being hidden then their public appearance — on which Sartre insists — must also be a disappearing act. Only by appearing can Jews disappear. Appearing is the role of the ‘authentic Jew’ who, says Sartre, ‘accepts the obligation to live in a situation that is defined precisely by the fact that it is unlivable; he derives his pride from his humiliation’ [137].
While Alain Finkielkraut had jumped, as a young man, to assume the mantle of existential authenticity that Sartre had so generously laid down for him, he later doubted whether authenticity was ever an option. As he accounts in The Imaginary Jew, his own situation as the son of Holocaust survivors had meant inheriting ‘a suffering to which I had not been subjected, for without having to endure oppression, the identity of the victim was mine’[7]. ‘Others had suffered’, he writes,

and I, because I was their descendant, harvested all the moral advantage. The allotment was inescapable: for them, utter abandonment and anonymous death, and for their spokesperson, sympathy and honour. [11]

Finkielkraut’s acute sense of inauthenticity makes Sartre’s mandate to the post-war Jew begin to look symptomatic of its author’s own failure to gauge a ‘true and lucid consciousness’ of the new reality. That the Holocaust had changed the meaning of the name Jew was clear to Finkielkraut by 1980, when he sensed that to address oneself as a Jew in France was to play the part of the victim (even if one was not a victim), leading him to an uncomfortable conclusion: perhaps he has no right to speak as a Jew; perhaps he has no right to speak for the Jews, as their ‘spokesperson’. Ever since the Holocaust, he writes,the word Jew has been unable to take its place in ordinary language, whether neutral or profane. Jew is a holy term: holy as in transcendent, inaccessible, in a realm beyond our grasp. This unapproachable name resists representation, remains apart from those who give it weight. The Jew may be our civilization’s Other, but it is an otherness none can possess. To put it still more bluntly: the Holocaust has no heirs. [34]

Outside ordinary language, the name Jew seems to mark a return to another kind of language: the sacred. As such, those who bear this name could find themselves silenced by it, for one cannot, says Finkielkraut, in a direct way, ‘inherit’ the Holocaust:

Even the affirmation ‘I am a Jew’ quickly produces a painful sense that I’m appropriating the Holocaust as my own, draping myself with the torture that others underwent. [32]

Finkielkraut’s discomfort in assuming an identity that should — by rights, by custom and inheritance — have been his own, has less to do with the shame or mauvais foi with which Sartre had marked out the inauthentic Jew than with a nagging sense of guilt that might even be characterised as religious. For what the Jew, in this context, who calls himself ‘Jew’ effectively risks is not existential humiliation so much as sacrilege.
Guilt, for Sartre, is a marker of inauthenticity. The Jew can be guilty only insofar as, like the man who stands before the law in Kafka’s Trial, ‘he does not know what he is charged with, yet he knows that he is considered guilty’ [87]. It is, says Sartre, the ‘perpetual obligation to prove that he is French that puts the Jew in [this inauthentic] situation of guilt.’ Finkielkraut’s post-war Jew, on the other hand, stands before a law whose commandment has, finally, been revealed: he is obliged to prove that he is a Jew. His ‘situation of guilt’ nonetheless remains because what has been commanded can only be fulfilled by enacting its desecration. This is the situation of guilt to which Finkielkraut attests as regards the impossibility of either inheriting the history of the Holocaust on the one hand, or consigning it to the past on the other. Yet, while the confessional quality of Finkielkraut’s remarks seems to represent the dilemmas of descendants or succeeding generations, his sense of aporia recalls and resembles the guilt more often associated with ‘survivors’ themselves. One thinks, for example, of Primo Levi’s sense of his own illegitimacy as a witness, notwithstanding his first hand experiences of the concentration camps, because, for Levi, the true witnesses, and thus the only ones with a right to tell the history of the Holocaust, are the dead and murdered who cannot speak for themselves.
Writing about his work with concentration camp victims in 1961, the American psychoanalyst William G. Niederland noted that ‘feelings of guilt accompanied by shame, self-condemnatory tendencies and self-accusations [are] experienced by the victims of the persecution, and apparently much less (if at all) by the perpetrators of it’6. Drawing on Freud’s discussion of how the aggressive instincts against one’s parents can become transformed into guilt reflexes, Nierderland understood ‘survivor’s guilt’ in analogous terms as an affective response to what Anna Freud had termed the victim’s ‘identification with the aggressor.’ As Ruth Leys explains,
The idea was that under conditions of violent threat and powerlessness the inmates’ only psychic solution was not to resist but to give in to the threatening situation — by identifying with or fantasmatically incorporating the oppressor. [33]

In the writings of later psychologists and scholars, however, this explanation of ‘survivor’s guilt’ has been rather discredited. As Leys notes in her study, From Guilt to Shame, Auschwitz and After, recent researchers have more often linked the phenomenon of survivor’s guilt to a different site of identification: “if survivors feel guilty, they do so because of their identification with the dead victims, not because of their psychic collusion with violence” [53]. Leys believes this re-ascription of survivor identification (from an identification with the aggressor to an identification with the victim) to form part of a more general trend whose aim it has been to clear the survivor of any trace of guilt so that, in Terrence Des Pres’s words, ‘Survivors do not bear witness to guilt, neither theirs nor ours, but to objective conditions of evil’ [68]. Guilt (with its fantasmatic associations) thus gives way to a more ‘objective’ witnessing while its phenomenal ‘affect’ is reinterpreted with recourse to a replacement term: shame. What differentiates guilt from shame, says Leys, quoting Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, is that ‘shame attaches to and sharpens the sense of what one is, whereas guilt attaches to what one does’ [130]. Unlike guilt, therefore, shame leads back to fundamental questions about the nature of identity.
During the same period in which Leys has tracked a shift of emphasis from guilt to shame she has also observed a concomitant raising of the status of the figure of the ‘survivor.’ Beginning around the 1970s, when this figure began to gain prominence in medical and legal settings following the return of Vietnam war veterans who sought compensation for the psychological effects suffered on account of PTSD, the identity was then retrospectively projected back on to the Holocaust survivor, who belatedly became its paradigm case. This construction of the survivor as an identifiable figure (recognisable in a court of law) has, if Leys is correct, been achieved by relegating the concern with ‘what one does’ to a greater emphasis on ‘what one is.’ Consequently, the ‘survivor’ is ‘viewed less as an individual whose mode of life needs to be understood and interpreted than as a new kind of material object, identity, or type of person’ [68]. This transition can be linked to the developing literature surrounding the theory of emotions. As Leys remarks,

whereas guilt was conceptualised within an intentionalist framework in that the guilty subject was imagined as having fantasmatic identificatory intentions toward the aggressor, the new shame theory proposes an antiintentionalist account of the affects and an emphasis on the built-in responses of the body. [184]

By recasting guilt as shame and by relocating affective responses in the body rather than the psyche, the ‘survivor’ becomes a passive receptacle for the purely external forces of History/Reality.
Seen in this light, Finkielkraut’s attestation, as a non-survivor, to the intractability of his position (which he expresses in terms not dissimilar to Primo Levi’s disavowal of his powers as a witness) calls for further consideration. After all, what Finkielkraut feels unable to ‘represent’ is not the Holocaust so much as his own (Jewish) identity: just as Levi feels himself an illegitimate spokesperson for the former, so Finkielkraut feels himself an illegitimate spokesperson for the latter. The burden of guilt thus commutes from the survivors to their nominal descendants. But how and why does this happen? If ‘feelings’ are grounded in the material reality of the body, how does one explain the transmission of ‘trauma’ from one generation to the next?
Within the study of the humanities the theoretical discipline that addresses the Jewish experience most directly is Trauma Studies. Cathy Caruth (probably the best known and most influential theorist in the field) adapts Freud’s theory of a ‘latency’ period with regard to the emergence of the traumatic neuroses in order to consider trauma as an experience that can only be known by means of its symptoms and after-effects: ‘the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it’7. The traumatised subject thus carries ‘an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess’ [5]. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, to discover the post-war Jew, whose ‘otherness none can possess,’ appearing in conjunction with trauma theory. For, if trauma can partly be characterised by its own silencing, then Finkielkraut’s repudiation of the role of ‘Jewish spokesperson’ might reasonably be interpreted as an actual symptom or resurfacing of the trauma from which he feels himself excluded. Finkielkraut, one could say, encounters the impossibility of his own situation by means of a constitutive confusion that could, paradoxically, entail his turning out to be what he feels he definitively isn’t, i.e. a legitimate descendant of the Holocaust. A kind of Solomonic principle thus obtains: whoever forsakes his or her claim to the Holocaust must be its true witness, spokesperson or heir.
It is along similar lines that Caruth has argued that language can only bear witness to trauma by means of its failure of representation. As Ruth Leys remarks in Trauma: A Genealogy, Caruth’s ‘work epitomises the contemporary literary-critical fascination with the allegedly unrepresentable and unspeakable nature of trauma, especially the trauma of the Holocaust, which in effect stands in for trauma generally’.8 (although Leys objects to Caruth’s appropriation of only the temporal dimension of Freud’s theory of latency, thereby excluding his conception of the role played in trauma by unconscious repression)9. Caruth also describes how traumatic experiences can infect others (or later generations) who have been, as Leys puts it, ‘in touch not with a representation of the horror but the literal repetition of it’ [252]. That which cannot represent itself (in words or images) appears through this re-enactment or performance; trauma ‘cannot be cured but simply transmitted – passed on’ [252].
Caruth’s insistence on the ‘literal’ impact of trauma rests, for Leys, on some shaky ‘scientific-epistemological origins.’ But why would Caruth wish to lay claim to a literal encounter with trauma? Is Caruth’s ‘literal’ perhaps another term for Sartre’s ‘authenticity’? For Sartre, we recall, the authentic Jew recognises himself as a projection of the anti-Semite’s imagination. As such, Jewish authenticity entails a true and lucid consciousness of an essentially negative situation, which, for Sartre, is not a situation of agency but one of passivity. Indeed, it’s precisely insofar as the Jew occupies a position of passivity (or martyrdom) that he, by priding himself in his humiliation, may be counted an object-ive witness. Such constitutive passivity, however, inevitably requires the intervention of others, such as Sartre, to testify on the Jew’s behalf, in much the same way as ‘trauma’ depends on the intervention of trauma theorists to recognise and thus realise its own existence.
Ruth Leys’s genealogy of trauma as a concept is joined by John Mowitt’s genealogy of trauma studies as a discipline.10 Genealogies might be said to investigate who those who speak in the name of trauma are really speaking for. Unlike Leys, however, whose Genealogy aims to rescue psychoanalysis from its misappropriation by trauma theory, Mowitt renders his genealogy applicable to both. According to Mowitt, the mutual reinforcement of Trauma Studies and Psychoanalysis occurs because both are self-generating discourses with no objective referent other than that which appears through the exercise of their own frameworks. Indeed, Mowitt charges that psychoanalysis’ conceptualisation of loss or fantasmatic injury through the positing of theories such as castration anxiety and penis envy has led to a situation whereby loss or injury (and not just the fear of them) have in themselves become sources of fantasy and fetishisation. Identifying a similar envy of the fantasy-wound in psychoanalytic appropriations of trauma, he notes, for example, how in the work of recent psychoanalytic thinkers in the post-Lacanian tradition (he cites the example of Slavoj Žižek), the concept of trauma ceases to function in the register of specific narratives or histories and finds itself universalised.
In the post-Lacanian context, the ‘lost object’ of traumatic experience is made analogous to the event of becoming-subject (subjectivity). Everyone who can refer to themselves as a subject, as ‘I’, has, by very definition, experienced traumatic alienation from the grounds of their own being (Lacan’s ‘Real’). The ‘Real’ designates that which we, as socialised subjects, have become permanently alienated from: the Real is lost to us; we cannot know it, if, by knowledge, one refers to that which can be symbolised or represented. The moment we learn to speak as ourselves, for ourselves, we forfeit the Real. Nonetheless, within this picture, a glimpse of the Real remains accessible through the experience of trauma, which, however, as the rupturing of the everyday, symbolic order, cannot itself be symbolised.
What Mowitt wants to address by locating the exemplary status of trauma in Žižek’s ontology is how vital Žižek renders the ability to lay claim to a submerged relationship to traumatic experience as the foundation of any further claims (in Žižek’s case this includes philosophical speculations about the nature of truth or reality). Žižek thus universalises trauma as an experience in order to draw a certain kind of inspiration from it: trauma, in this view, has something of an erotic fascination; it is lost to us in the psychoanalytic narrative just as Eden or paradise is lost to us in the Biblical narrative. Suspicion of trauma as a concept is surely awakened, however, when everyone wants to be included within the elite circle of the traumatised. What strange sort of privilege is trauma? Is it a privilege because, as in Žižek’s philosophy, trauma opens a window on to the Real? Or is it, rather, because of the ‘moral advantages’ conferred upon the victim, as described by Finkielkraut? Indeed, what does it to mean to be in possession of a specifically ‘moral’ advantage?
The advantage of morality, as Mowitt understands it, rests in the way the moral spokesperson stands apparently beyond the reproaches of the partisan or merely political. Thus the moral advantage of trauma is that, by virtue of its universal claims, it can silence all opposition or dissent: trauma claims to speak from beyond private or particular ‘interests’ in a supra-political way. Trauma Studies, Mowitt therefore argues, is really trauma envy. It is a discipline envious of the specifically moral advantages imaginatively extended to anyone who can lay claim to a significant wound; it is an envy of the wound as possessing the power to silence the demands or resentments of all others.
Mowitt’s method of genealogical critique, however, lays itself open to very similar charges. For if Trauma Studies is envious of ‘trauma’ as its disciplinary object, then, by equivalent reasoning, Mowitt’s genealogy might be suspected of envying Trauma Studies. Mowitt even expresses his resentment of trauma as a concept whose disciplinisation has, he believes, led to an unfortunate post-war phenomenon: the displacement of politics by ethics. Taking Holocaust Studies as his example, Mowitt writes,

if the rich and conflicted scholarship on the Holocaust of the last half century has taught us anything, it is that what remains most difficult and urgent to discern about this catastrophe is not its moral significance or character, but how the conditions for it arose within a world that remains ours. […] [T]he Holocaust is the event that, in cleaving the moral universe from top to bottom, is regarded as providing humanity’s moral compass with its poles. [293-4]

Indeed, this may not be all that surprising because, while Mowitt identifies Žižek as a typical expositor of the trauma theory he criticises, Žižek in fact has exactly the same analysis as Mowitt regarding the supplanting of politics by morality. These are Žižek’s words:

[T]he reference to the Holocaust as the ultimate, unthinkable, apolitical crime, as the Evil so radical that it cannot be politicised (accounted for by a political dynamic), serves as the operator which allows us to depoliticise the social sphere, to warn against the presumption of politicization. The Holocaust is the name for the unthinkable excess of politics itself: it compels us to subordinate politics to some more fundamental ethics.11

The explicit precedent for Mowitt’s genealogy of trauma is Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, in which Nietzsche unmasks Judeo-Christian morality as ressentiment in much the same way as Mowitt unmasks Trauma Studies as envy. In both these genealogies moralising discourse is unveiled as the resentment of a particular group, and in both cases the Jews, whether as Hebrew slaves or as victims of the Holocaust, represent their private or group interests as universal ones. For Nietzsche, moral discourse originates as a pragmatic strategy of the weak to induce ‘guilt’ in those more powerful than they. But what happens when the weak gain power themselves? Genealogical analyses could certainly lend support to the argument that Holocaust memory has been co-opted in the political interests of Zionist ideology, the security of the Jewish State, as well as in certain neo-conservative strands in the US and beyond. On the other hand, one can similarly observe the Holocaust’s appearance in countervailing (anti-Zionist) discourses, where the memory of the Second World War has often been invoked as the critical context for those wishing to remark the ‘irony’ of the victim turning into the perpetrator. The Holocaust-referent thus finds itself mobilised to ground the universal (moral) claims of opposing sides of the same (political) issues.
By presenting events in moral rather than political terms, those who choose to speak in the name of the Holocaust may be suspected of failing to represent their true interests or intentions. Such suspicious hermeneutics, however, could find themselves subjected to the same form of critical scrutiny. For if what appears as ‘power’ here is the power to silence other voices, and if Holocaust history has been deliberately instrumentalised in order to silence criticism (e.g. of Israel’s occupation of Palestine), then the critic drawing out such inferences might risk repeating the offence by returning the Holocaust from its fallen state of ‘industry’ back into its original state of muteness. Consider, for example, Karyn Ball’s perception of

a growing climate of resentment against those of us who [work] on the Holocaust ‘at the expense of’ more recent genocides and contemporary forms of violent persecution. It is a resentment that is intimately and acritically bound up with anti-Zionist sentiment and the leftists position on Israel. There were already grumblings in the early 1990s among those scholars who are rightly critical of the Zionist expropriation of the Palestinians, but who insensitively deny their Jewish colleagues the right to pursue Holocaust scholarship because it is an ostensible symptom of pro-Jewish and, by implication, pro-Zionist sentiment. Among these academics in particular, the study of the Holocaust has come to be increasingly disparaged and stigmatised as a politically misguided, self-indulgent, and narcissistic pursuit. [13-4]

What system of values is in play when the Holocaust appears a self-indulgent, narcissistic pursuit?
To better gauge how this situation may have come about it’s worth revisiting Sartre’s anticipation of the post-war politics of identity. In his discussion of the post-war Jew the philosopher had called attention to the limitations of the post-Enlightenment ideal of universal ‘man’ qua ‘universal subject of the rights of man and the rights of the citizen’ [57]. Sartre’s conception of the ‘authentic Jew’ is based on this same insight that ‘the man does not exist; there are Jews, Protestants, Catholics; there are Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans; there are whites, blacks, yellows.’ As such, the ‘authentic Jew abandons the myth of the universal man; he knows himself and wills himself into history’ [136]. He can do this in one of two ways, by either aligning himself with the Zionist project for national self-determination (insofar as history’s actors, for Sartre, are always bound to the logic of nations), or by deriving pride from humiliation. The choice between national identity and victim identity is not a far cry from the alternative politics of the anti-Semite and the democrat. Their shared formulation of the Jewish question (‘[i]s he first a Jew or first a man?’), which Sartre had mightily criticised, is nonetheless answered, by Sartre, in symmetrical terms: as an Israeli the authentic Jew can speak for the Jews, as a victim he must speak for mankind. For the Jew who speaks in the name of the Holocaust can only do so by turning Jewish history into universal history and turning the Jew into a symbol of all humanity. This, in fact, accords with Sartre’s own image of the Jew, ‘whose only reason for existing,’ as he put it, ‘is to serve as scapegoat [...] this species bears witness for essential humanity better than any other because it was born of secondary reactions within the body of humanity’ [136] (my italics).
Like those he reprimands, Sartre may be suspected of inventing the Jew as an object (a ‘body’) upon which to ground his own claims to universality. His injunction to the (non-Israeli) Jew to derive pride from humiliation runs parallel to Ruth Leys’ observation regarding trauma theory’s transposition of guilt into shame: both make of the Jew (or the survivor) not an agent of history, but a receptacle. Partly, this stems from an understandable wish not to blame the victim for her own suffering. Paradoxically, however, insofar as guilt, unlike shame, pertains to what one does (or would like to do) rather than what one is, the notion of ‘survivor’s guilt’ could yet return to the survivor a power of agency such as must be absolutely necessary if she is to have a future.

1 Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (eds.), The Jew In The Text, Modernity and the Construction of Identity, (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1995), p. 6.
2 Karyn Ball, ‘Trauma and Its Institutional Destinies,’ pp. 1-44, Cultural Critique 46 (2000), p. 13.
3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), p. 71.
4 Jew In The Text, p. 201.
5 Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 9.
6 Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 30.
7 Cathy Caruth, introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 4.
8 Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 16.
9 In trauma theory, says Leys, there is no longer an unconscious in the Freudian sense. When the traumatised subject dreams, for example, ‘the traumatic response is defined in terms not of repressed motives, disguised representations, and unconscious symbolic meanings but the literal, unmediated impact of the event.’[273]
10 John Mowitt, ‘Trauma Envy,’ Cultural Critique 46 (2000), pp. 272-297.
11 Slavoj Žižek, afterword to Jacques Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics, (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 73.

Devorah Baum is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Southampton. She is also affiliated to Southampton’s Parkes Institute, a unique centre for the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations across the ages.

The above is an edited version of a longer essay: Trauma: An Essay on Jewish Guilt from English Studies in Africa, 52:1 (2009), pp. 15-27

Freud and the early analysts (almost all of whom were Jewish) enabled psychoanalysis to flower as a marginal discipline offering a critical perspective on its host society. It thrived particularly because of the acuity with which it named sexuality as the core disturbance in European culture; in a society dominated by extreme sexual repression and hypocrisy, Freud named names. Sex was at the heart of everything. Sexual drives are people’s key motivational impulse (opposed by ‘ego preservative drives’), and Freud’s general picture of mental activity was based on a sexual metaphor. The ‘pleasure principle’, understood as a kind of orgasmic release of psychic tension, was the major principle of psychological functioning. Libidinal energy, held at bay and repressed, is always seeking freedom; if it cannot have it directly, it comes through as symptoms of disease, jokes and dreams.
The relevance of Jewish identity and tradition to Freud has been discussed at length. In relation to sex, there have been attempts to show Freud as working specifically in a ‘Jewish’ tradition, accepting sex as legitimate and enjoyable, recognising feminine sexuality while also denigrating women. Whether or not this is supportable, there is no doubt about the degree to which Freud’s Jewish identity influenced his thinking and his writing — in addition to his book of Jewish jokes there are freqeunt references to Jews and anti-Semitism in The Interpretation of Dreams as well as his direct comments on being Jewish. Freud claimed that its importance could be seen in his capacity for persevering in the face of opposition, in particular remaining ‘free of many prejudices which restrict others in the use of the intellect’. Jewishness gave him the strength not to look away when presented with the demons beneath the acceptable face of society. He saw that what drove this society, and what created its suffering, was in large measure its sexual life, and this confirmed the importance of greater sexual freedom and honesty for everyone.
Memoirs of the time show that the Freudian lesson was well learned: the reduction of sexual hypocrisy that came about in Europe in the first half of the twentieth-century was highly significant for political and moral thought, raising the possibility of a more free society in which libidinal impulses could be channelled into creative and joyful experiences. The emergence of the Nazi regime brought this to an abrupt end. Labelling psychoanalysis as a ‘Jewish’ science, degenerate and corrupting in its insistence on sexuality, the Nazis largely succeeded in stamping out Freudian practice and replacing it with an ‘aryan’ psychotherapy charged with mobilising the unconscious in the task of building the new state. After the war, for understandable reasons, much of European psychoanalysis became focused on destructiveness rather than sexuality. In America, meanwhile, the psychoanalysts (many of whom had fled occupied Europe), plied their trade, warding off the demons of explosive sex, and Jews kept shouting with joy at being liberated.  America had always traded on its relative freedom from restraint though, as has often been pointed out in relation to psychoanalysis, this could be a cover for ‘normalising’ potentially subversive doctrines. Conformity, professional sobriety and a theory making adaptation to the surrounding society the measure of mental health, characterised American psychoanalysis immediately after the Second World War.  At the same time, the rhythms and uncertainties of immigrant life, the speech patterns of Jewish ex-Europeans and the abrasive argumentativeness of their culture made an increasingly loud mark on America. The onrush of the 1960s allowed psychoanalysis to find expression in a more vigorous and exuberant version of what had happened in Europe fifty years before. Sex was once again central to this; indeed at times it seemed as if political freedom from the damage wrought by the previous generation could be reduced to the joy of sex.
Unfortunately for Jews, this joy was always mixed with guilt, as if the unconscious could not be allowed out without betrayal. Did this mean escaping the past always had to involve renouncing it completely, so that the values of one generation were constantly being traduced? More fully, was it the internalisation of Jewish suffering, fear and constraint that meant that as each new Jew leapt about apparently unfettered, the chains were already tightening within? Was it the sheer manic exuberance of the escape, which had to bring in its wake a depressive — or at least anxiety-ridden — undertow? Or was it guilt produced by paranoia, a terrible fear of breaking away, as if clinging together had ever been the route to security? In America, this paradox of full freedom and the inability to enjoy it without being punished seems to have reached its apogee — it made the Jews paragons for the culture as a whole. Bursting with life, they grasped hold of the world to make it absolutely their own, and just as they did so their nightmares emerged and plagued the day. For many Americans, these nightmares took the form of violence, racial tension, assassinations, betrayal of hope. For the Jews, these things occurred as well, but so too did the ever-enfeebling sense that something fraudulent was taking place, that the joy of being free was actually a manic cover for the despair of loss.

Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, when it appeared in 1969, was explosive. For one thing, it had a remarkable voice, that of the American English of the Jews, yiddishised, inverted, plaintive, comic and confessional. ‘For mistakes she checked my sums; for holes, my socks; for dirt, my nails, my neck, every seam and crease of my body.’ The book is a long speech, on the psychoanalyst’s couch, not interrupted by anything (all good Freudians being silent), and it is in the movement of this speech that sex, guilt, lust, desire and depravity are created. The question is, what does this speech say of Jews, Freudianly, and what now, on the fortieth anniversary of its publication, seems to remain?
This is not a book about sex, although sex is its vehicle. The formal definition of ‘Portnoy’s complaint’ given by his analyst in the book’s epigraph makes this clear: ‘neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.’ As a particularly prescient (though theologically slightly wayward) New York Times reviewer wrote at the time — linking Freud, Jews, America and Portnoy — it is much more a novel about guilt: ‘Guilt-edged insecurity is far more important when it comes to the making — and unmaking — of an American Jew than, say, chicken soup or chopped liver. For guilt is as traditionally American as Thanksgiving Day pumpkin pie and, at the same time, on native grounds, as far as Jews are concerned: it was the Jews who originated that mother lode of guilt, the theological concept of original sin; it was a Jew who developed psychoanalysis, that clinical faith based on a belief in the transferability and negotiability of long-term debts and credits in guilt.’ Portnoy both relishes his guilt and laments it, simultaneously baffled by his mother’s power to generate it and his father’s ability to stand by and watch her. He accepts utterly the Freudian notion that guilt and hostility go together, driven on by the fear of castration. What other mother threatens her son with a knife when he refuses to eat? His mother is ‘so deeply imbedded in my consciousness,’ the book begins, ‘that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.’ Her magical power of knowing everything (‘And this is before radar!’) is the least of her capacities: her main one, accompanied by her husband, is to detonate torpedoes of guilt. ‘Doctor, these people are incredible! These people are unbelievable! These two are the outstanding producers and packagers of guilt in our time!’ And this is when Alex has grown up; it is what remains from his childhood.
In the Freudian scheme, guilt originates from the father. The boy’s Oedipal wishes towards his mother rouse the ire of the mighty father, and it is he who threatens the boy with castration. What with this and the boy’s own antagonism towards his father, backed up with only paltry force, combat becomes pointless and instead the boy represses his desire, identifies with the father’s aggression (taking as recompense the promise that later on he will be the father too) and internalises the prohibition on incest that will make everything safe. The superego appears, ‘a garrison in a conquered city’, and transforms the internalised threat of punishment into guilt. From that moment on, the child’s every thought and action is judged with the same sadistic vigilance with which the external world judges crimes. Portnoy’s Complaint, however, reverses this scheme: the father is weak and constipated, exploited by his employers and sidelined by his wife. The mother is, by contrast, the Oedipal victor: inescapable, irrepressible, continually seductive and the root of Alex’s castration fears. She is also the source of his impotence: she threatens him with a knife when he will not eat; as her own special brand of toilet-training she tickles his penis; even as an adult, she carries on playing the game. ‘My own mother, let me remind you, when I returned this past summer from my adventure in Europe, greets me over the phone with the following salutation: “Well, how is my lover?” Her lover, she calls me, while her husband is listening on the other extension! And it never occurs to her, if I’m her lover, who is he, the schmegeggy she lives with?’ Although familiar from the Jewish mother jokes of the time (‘Dr Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I’m living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke — only it ain’t no joke!’), this actually marks a reversal. In Culture of Narcissism Christopher Lasch argues that the failure of the paternal function pushes the child into an overwhelming, narcissistic relationship with the mother and prevents him from confronting ‘reality’. For Lasch, narcissism was a diagnosis of a whole society, riven with anxiety and insecurity, unable to invoke or deal with authority, lost in a fantasy of absorption in a mother who would make everything safe and whole. The result: a society too fragile to tolerate intimacy, thought or psychic depth.
Roth’s Jewish version of this is different: the problem of the absent patriarch is that it leaves the field open for the castrating mother, not the softly engulfing one. This is not so much narcissism (though this is one response to it) as paranoia. Tribal, cultic, belligerent, manipulative, loving, enticing (such cooking!), hysterical and psychosomatic — these mothers invade their sons so completely that there is no space for movement away from them; they are carried wherever the boy goes. One effect of this, shared by Lasch and Roth, is to invoke a kind of reactionary nostalgia for a lost (fantasy) world in which men were men (baseball their creed) and could get rid of their mothers, a world in which the knife would be turned the other way. This is, perhaps, one motivation for Portnoy’s obsession with those shikses who break his mother’s heart and, of course, for his refusal to give her grandchildren. Is this the Jewish version of the culture of narcissism? If one takes Portnoy’s symptom as an inability to form authentic relationships — illustrated in his flight from women, even his belovedly perverse Monkey, who want something sustainable from him — then he is indeed narcissistic. Sex is an escape from intimacy, not an expression of it. Freud might have been drawing on Jewish sentiments in making sex acceptable as a force in people’s lives. The polymorphous perversity of Portnoy, however, is not only a slap in the face for conventional sexuality, Jewish or otherwise; it is specifically anti-Freudian because of its driven quality, its dissatisfaction. Portnoy’s sex is angry, dismissive and rebellious, embodying the narcissism of its time.
There is still, nevertheless, something disturbingly joyous about Portnoy’s Complaint. The impotence that brings him to psychoanalysis is the trigger for his reminiscences, but the exuberant stories of his sexual experiences in their mind-boggling virtuosity are, themselves, compelling. Can anyone really live like this? Can it get any better? Or any worse? And what is one to make of the disgraceful misogyny and mother-blaming that pervade the book, the main markers of its ageing? The sour taste of misogyny, mitigated only slightly by Portnoy’s awareness of the link between his woman-hating and fear (he is relaxed in the Turkish bath with his father, because ‘there are no women here. No women and no goyim. Can it be? There is nothing to worry about!’), has accelerated over the years to make the book fairly intolerable as a sexist rant. Indeed, Portnoy’s sexual antics, so vibrant and funny, are all of a piece with his misogyny, an agonisingly accurate portrayal of compulsive masculine sexuality. One feels that the retribution visited on Portnoy towards the end of the book — understood by him, in part, as punishment for his treatment of women — might augur the well-deserved gender retaliation that continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s as well as signalling some of the contestable elements of Roth’s great late-period works. But even the bitter taste of woman-hating that lurks so close to the surface is insufficient to dampen the ebullience of the book.
In Roth’s version of American Jewry, there is no mystery at all — everything is on the surface. ‘No, you don’t have to go digging where these people are concerned,’ laments Portnoy, ‘they wear the old unconscious on their sleeves!’ The problem here is a mixture of an old-fashioned hysteria and a new melancholia, which are brought together in an extraordinarily combustible way. Everything is too much, too grandly portrayed; the drama is unbearable (‘The hysteria and the superstition!’). But at its heart, too, is something tragic.
In the midst of all his excoriating of Jewish life, of its insularity (‘Momma, do we believe in winter?’), inhibition and goyim-hating fearfulness, Portnoy has some sense of the sadness of it all, of his father’s basic goodness that is done down by those who dump on him, of his mother’s neediness and anxiety. The idea that the Holocaust is responsible for Jewish neurosis gets short shrift in Portnoy’s Complaint, despite being put in the mouth of Alex’s honoured sister Hannah; his response to this particular guilt-tripping is: ‘I suppose the Nazis are an excuse for everything that happens in this house!’ ‘Oh I don’t know,’ she says, crying. What is clearer, however, is that Portnoy’s Complaint laments the loss of what-could-have-been. Grasping life with both hands, living out sexual fantasies that others only dream about (‘With a life like mine, Doctor, who needs dreams?’), it pulsates with energy and not only with narcissistic waste. Portnoy, after all, does good in his working life; he represents the innocent against the exploiters, and he does this with considerable pride. But somehow none of this stacks up against the huge weight of inhibition, the internal and acted-out punishment that his Oedipally corrupted superego metes out to him. The bad guys are really bad, but they don’t care; he only transgresses as a way of breaking out of his chains, yet his punishment is immediate and graphic, the inner police always get him. The howl that ends the book and starts the analysis proper, that eruption of utterly infantile, even animal, agony that finally puts an end to all this talk, all his ‘kvetching’ (‘a form of truth’, for people like Portnoy), is just the culmination of the howl that is the whole book. It is a howl of pain, frustration and indignation, for sure, but also of loss. ‘Let’s put the id back in yid!’ may be Portnoy’s manifesto, seeking the imaginary pure enjoyment that is enacted without any consequences — the liberated dream of the sixties, perhaps — but what seems to hold the yids back is not just maternal oppression, not just hysteria, not even fear and guilt; it’s that something has been promised that has also been taken away. American Jewry’s great period of creativity seems to have gone. Its remnants and reminders take the form of these laments, these howls, always nostalgic and also coruscating, desperate to break free, but laments nonetheless. Something is lost as the Jews become normal, as America catches up with them, something that they never knew they had.

Stephen Frosh is Professor of Psychology in the School of Psychosocial Studies and Pro-Vice-Master at Birkbeck College, University of London. His book Hate and the Jewish Science is published by Palgrave.

And of course there was Louis B. Mayer, who ‘had forgotten exactly where in Russia he had been born and on what day,’ and whose voortrek took him to Canada, then to Boston where he made money in the salvage business, before heading west to found Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Benjamin Warner left his wife and children in Poland, worked as a cobbler in Baltimore, brought his family over to the new world, then ‘…For years, he roamed the East and Canada, peddling notions from a wagon before finally settling in Youngstown, Ohio.’ Here Warner raised the four sons whose purchase of a broken film projector set them on the road to become the eponymous Warner Brothers.

Gabler’s contention is that what typified all these Jewish men was ‘a patrimony of failure’, which led to an: ‘utter and absolute rejection of their pasts’, with a concomitant ‘absolute devotion to their new country’. With these luftmenshen in the role of Polybus, the founding Oedipuses of Hollywood took the road west, unconsciously intent on using the nascent movie industry as a means of storming the precincts of American ‘gentility, respectability and status’ that they were otherwise prohibited from entering.

So far, so lacking in contentiousness. This much we know: the white picket fences of the Andy Hardy movies, behind which Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland romped in pubescent faux-innocence; or the carpenter gothic that was the required framing for the ‘wonderful life’ limned in by Frank Capra at the behest of Harry Cohn — these were clever gestalts of Americana, fabricated in the central European Jewish psyche, then projected on to giant screens, so that the movie-going masses might emote, then cathect. This does not much interest me — it seems a given.

But what does grab me — worry me, even, a terrier at my imagination — is how Gabler’s account of this Jewish empire-building is so lacking in a spatial or geographic context.  Apart from the bald schema mittel-European plain – Ellis Island – Beverly Hills, and a few remarks on the condition of Los Angeles in 1900s ‘a primitive outpost…paved roads ended abruptly downtown… its main architecture small shacks engulfed by orange and pepper trees.’  There is only a nod to the topography we all know: ‘Hollywood…Twelve miles from the Pacific Ocean and isolated on a gentle swell,’ before the place itself sinks to the substratum of Gabler’s narrative of men, a handful of women and power.

If Los Angeles locations are scouted at all in Gabler’s 432-page history of the movies, it is only to furnish sets for a handful of scenes — such as the notorious ‘consultations’ by members of the House Committee for Un-American Activities at the downtown Biltmore Hotel in May 1947; or the meetings of the celebrated ‘comedians’ circle’ at the Hillcrest Country Club; or again, the vast mansions and fantastical estates created by the Hollywood elite in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, which, with their Cuisinart of architectural styles represented the dernier cri of pretension, certainly, but also of arrival.

Of course, it’s reasonable to ask: why should An Empire of Their Own concern itself with Hollywood and Los Angeles as places at all? Apart from the balmy climate, and the particular southern Californian quality of light that made it possible to film year-round without the use of costly Klieg lights, there was surely no greater geographic imperative that made this basin, the valley of the Los Angeles river, the cockpit of an entertainment industry; one which — I would argue — fed for the greater part of the twentieth century the entire globe’s insatiable appetite for narrative and image. Hollywood and movies are not, in this respect, like the Ruhr with its coal and iron, or the Ukrainian steppe wavering with wheat — the movies were not there already, waiting to be dug out of the ground.

I suppose it’s precisely because it was Hollywood that shaped and defined our perception of the greater Los Angeles area that the jibe between reality and representation looms so much greater in these parts than anywhere else in the Western world. Let me elaborate: I take it as a given that the technological advances in mass communications and transport that typified urban development in the twentieth century have resulted in the detachment of human from physical geography. We can point to the covering over of the Fleet River in London as the locus in quo of this new epoch. Henceforth neither physical features — rivers, hills, ravines — nor physical limitations — the traction of men and beasts — would define the urban landscape: cities would come, increasingly, to conform to Guy Debord’s formulation of the ‘society of the spectacle’, places shaped by economic imperatives, and even seen within the framing of work, entertainment and consumption.

What makes Los Angeles so special in this regard is the id of Hollywood itself. When Tod Hackett, the art director protagonist of Nathanael West’s great Hollywood novel The Day of the Locust comes upon the jumble at the back of his studio’s lot, he pushes his way through ‘a tangle of briars, old flats and iron junk, skirting the skeleton of a Zeppelin, a bamboo stockade, an adobe fort, the wooden horse of Troy, a flight of Baroque palace stairs that started in a bed of weeds and ended against the branches of an oak, part of the Fourteenth Street Elevated station, a Dutch windmill, the bones of a dinosaur, the upper half of the Merrimac, a corner of a Mayan temple, until he eventually reached the road’. (Incidentally, in case you’re wondering, the Merrimac referred to is almost certainly the USS Merrimac, the first ironclad built in the Civil War, so West juxtaposes eras, built environments with their pockets of herbage and modes of transport.)

Hackett, confronted with this ‘final dumping ground’, thinks of Janvier’s story In the Sargasso Sea, a history of civilisation encapsulated in the form of a marine junkyard. As an evolution of this, the studio’s back lot is, he realises, ‘a dream dump. A Sargasso of the imagination.’ Moreover, it is a dump that continually hypertrophies, for ‘there wasn’t a dream afloat somewhere which wouldn’t sooner or later turn up on it, having first been made photographic… Many boats sink and never reach the Sargasso, but no dream entirely disappears.’

Is it significant that West, a satiric writer and himself Jewish, was the first to grasp this particular aspect of Hollywood’s psychogeography? Probably. West understood that the process whereby cities are cut up by the economic imperatives of production, then re-edited by those of consumption, would reach its apogee in Los Angeles. The Day of the Locust, written in the mid-1930s, is less well known for its bucolic scenes — campfire picnics in the canyons of the Hollywood Hills — than its justly celebrated climax: a hideous riot by crazed fans outside a movie premiere being held at a thinly veiled Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, ‘Kahn’s Persian Theater’, on Hollywood Boulevard.

Now that the narrative cinema that Hollywood dominated for almost three-quarters of a century is moribund, its celluloid body gnawed at by the microscopic, digitised parasites of television and the Internet, we are left with a Sargasso Sea of an imagined Los Angeles, for never before in the history of humanity has a city been so relentlessly depicted and yet so little comprehended. Frame, zoom, pan, track, wide-angle or close-up, how many tens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of views of Los Angeles have we been sold, without ever seeing the whole picture? Is it fanciful to suggest that this slipperiness, this ungraspability of the sprawling conurbation, is itself a correlate of those other cities — from ancient Rome to modern London — that have been constructed from plaster and lath on the back lots of Paramount, Universal, MGM, et al.?

I think it worth swimming some more in West’s Sargasso of the imagination, because while he was the first to nail down its implications, the authors of two other important Hollywood novels were also notably taken by the spatial incongruities of the studios’ back lots. Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? was a cause célèbre when it was first published in 1941. In part this was because Schulberg was himself a Hollywood princeling — the son of Paramount production head B. P. Schulberg — in part because its depiction of a ruthlessly ambitious Hollywood producer was seen as inescapably anti-Semitic, but mostly because Schulberg’s privileged access to the imperial secrets made him able to lay bare the oedipal rage that Gabler characterises as the driving force of the moguls.

The Sammy of the title, Sammy Glick, is a second-generation American Jew whose steely nature is tempered in the forge of Manhattan’s lower East Side, and by his hatred for his frum father, a failed patriarch who, unable to earn a living in the New World, davens behind a handcart. Glick’s unwilling amanuensis, Al Manheim — significantly from a kindlier, reformed, small town Jewish background — discovers where Glick (né Glickstein) comes from: ‘Between a synagogue and a fish store, in a tenement laced with corroded fire escapes and sagging washing lines. It looked as if one healthy gust of wind would send its tired bricks tumbling into the narrow street. The hallway gave off a warm, sweet and infinitely unpleasant odor of age, of decay, of too many uncleaned kitchens too close together.’

Equally significant, to my way of thinking, Manheim has walked to Rivington Street in the East Village, downtown from Central Park. His 60-block traverse has afforded him the opportunity to meditate on ‘the irony of the fascist charge that the Jews have cornered the wealth of America, for here, where there are more Jews than anywhere else in the world, millions of them are crowded into these ghetto streets with the early American names’.

On the West Coast, the Hollywood inhabited by Glick, Manheim and the other characters is still recognisably the enlarged village that Gabler describes; the same faces are seen again and again at Hollywood and Vine, while all the major players can be witnessed, any evening, at the Brown Derby or Musso’s. However, Al Manheim and his lover, the wiseacre — but presumably gentile — screenwriter, Kit Carter, take this promenade upon leaving a meeting of the nascent Writers’ Guild: ‘We walked out past the sound stages and the machine shops and the labor gangs to the back lot. We walked past the New York street and up through the Latin Quarter of Paris until we came to a South Sea Island with a little beach leading down to real water. We crossed a little bridge to the island and sat down on the sand in front of a native hut. The hot April sun was just what the set designer ordered. I dug my hands into the warm sand and lay on my back, looking up through a palm tree supported with piano wire, at the cloudless sky.’

So far, so Nathanael West — and again, note the significance of walking — but the scene then opens out into another: the lovers leave the Sargasso of the imagination and drive west along Sunset Boulevard ‘past Westwood village, the home of UCLA, which is either the model for Hollywood’s version of campus life or vice versa.’ Then to the sea, where they visit Julian Baumberg, the creative nebuch, and then north towards Malibu. On the coastal road Kit remembers a real beach where she’s really swam, and they make their way down to it. Manheim remarks: ‘I almost broke my neck on the jagged path that angled down to the little beach that lay concealed and virginal below. Natural hydraulics working overtime for a couple of million years had scooped it right out of the cliffs.’

Schulberg thus tries to place Hollywood’s ingurgitation of the wider world within the context of a spatial awareness of Los Angeles, its guts and its flanks. When we pull back further from the cannibalistic tale of Sammy Glick eating his way to the top, we can appreciate that Schulberg — a native Angeleno — understands the physical geography of southern California perfectly. Throughout the novel Manheim, Glick and company shuttle back and forth from east to west coasts, by train, by car, by train again. Manheim says of his train flight from Sammy Glick: ‘It was consoling to lean back and let the distance between us widen tie by tie.’ What is underscored here is that Hollywood is integral to the western expansion of American civilisation, remaining then, now, and — if recent events are anything to go by — always at its final frontier.

F.  Scott Fitzgerald is the bridge between West and Schulberg spatially and metaphorically. Schulberg was his neighbour in the writers’ building, and the older author was one of the important champions of What Makes Sammy Run? Schulberg returned the compliment by writing The Disenchanted, an account of a great alcoholic novelist washed up on the desert island of Hollywood. West, bizarrely, died in a car accident on his way to Fitzgerald’s funeral. The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald’s Hollywood novel, was published posthumously, also in 1941, although its action takes place in 1935. The familiar motif of the Sargasso returns this time described by the narrator, Celia Brady: ‘Under the moon the back lot was thirty acres of fairyland — not because the locations really looked like African jungles and French chateaux and schooners at anchor and Broadway at night, but because they looked like the torn pictures of childhood…’

More laboured than West or Schulberg, I’m sure you’ll agree, and arguably in Celticising his female narrator (who was in fact based on David Selznick’s wife — and Louis B. Mayer’s daughter — Irene), Fitzgerald suffered from a certain cowardice in the face of the actualité: Hollywood was never an Irish empire. However, there is much The Last Tycoon has to teach us about the psychogeography of Los Angeles. Kathleen, the love interest of Monroe Stahr — the novel’s protagonist and the fictional alter-ego of the great producer Irving Thalberg — arrives when the Sargasso of the imagination is flooded: ‘On top of a huge head of the goddess Siva, two women were floating down the current of an impromptu river. The idol had come unloosed from a set of Burma, and it meandered earnestly on its way, stopping sometimes to waddle and bump in the shallows with the other debris of the tide.’ When Stahr makes his move on the young woman, it’s during an industry function at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard.

The following afternoon they rendezvous there again, and Stahr drives her west along Wilshire to Santa Monica, their progress — into infatuation — mirroring the expansion of Los Angeles itself. This is the road that exemplifies the city’s capitulation to the automobile, with its Streamline Moderne office blocks and apartment buildings, and its department stores purpose-built to be accessible by car. Like Al Manheim and Kit Carter, Stahr and Kathleen are an interfaith couple heading via one of Los Angeles’ human ecologies — Autopia — to another — Surfurbia. When they make love in Stahr’s half-built beach house, they are indulging as much in topic miscegenation as racial. No wonder the fog is so thick that they can’t see where they are: they are violating the utopia of Los Angeles by being anywhere at all.

So, there it is, whipped out in the open — the phallic car. In The Last Tycoon Celia Brady, all of twenty, turns on the car radio and accelerates up Laurel Canyon, describing herself thus: ‘I had good features except my face was too round, and a skin they seemed to love to touch, and good legs, and I didn’t have to wear a brassiere.’  You may have noted my insistence on the pedestrian in my consideration of The Day of the Locust and What Makes Sammy Run? And some of you may have been thinking: what’s this walking got to do with Hollywood or Los Angeles at all?

It was the architectural historian Reyner Banham, who, in his seminal 1971 study Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, defined those ecologies as ‘Surfurbia’, ‘Foothills’, ‘The Plains of Id’ and ‘Autopia’. Banham certainly ceded great significance to the car in his consideration of the built environment of Los Angeles, noting — for example — that ‘in (some) areas… the banks and cuttings of the freeways are often the only topographical features of note in the townscape.’ Banham also posited that the relationship between the Angelenos and the freeway system involved ‘a deep-seated mystique’, and pondered whether or not the horror stories routinely told concerning freeway driving were not intended ‘to prevent the profanation of their most sacred ritual by the uninitiated’.

However, when it came to what he termed ‘the common misconception that everything in Los Angeles is caused by the automobile as a way of life’, he was blunt: ‘If there has to be a mechanistic interpretation, then it must be that the automobile and the architecture alike are the products of the Pacific Electric Railroad as a way of life.’ I don’t have the space here to take you through the elegant circumambulations of Banham’s thesis on the built environment of Los Angeles, but let it suffice — for my argument — to give his punch line: ‘The houses and the automobiles are equal figments of the great dream, the dream of the urban homestead, the dream of the good life outside the squalors of the European type of city… Los Angeles cradles and embodies the most potent current version of the great bourgeois vision of the good life in a tamed countryside.’

Except for post-Marxist theorists of Los Angeles — for whom Mike Davis’s City of Quartz is Das Kapital — Banham’s dialectic would seem to be a truth universally acknowledged, with this proviso: if the thesis is a unitary, cubic instantiation of this ‘vision’, then, in the absence of any but the bare minimum of strategic planning — the antithesis — synthesis is effected by two modes of seeing, both of them screens. I would argue there is no real difference between Autopia and the utopia of Hollywood: they are both framed within a screen, they are both the means to the same end, a non-locatable vision of the good life, as experienced by the voyeur, who is static but presented with the illusion of control, either through his or her choice of what movie to see, or which freeway to take.

Of course Los Angeles antedated Hollywood by a long way, and even by the 1900s there were novelistic accounts of its peculiar human ecology, its domestic architecture of rampant individualism, its polymorphous hucksters and perverse boosterism. The film historian David Thomson, in his book The Whole Equation, theorises that perhaps the movies arrived in Hollywood too late. This is a mere trope, of course. The truth is that the Eastern European Jews arrived at exactly the right time to take part in the second great creative syncretism of American culture, the first being the collision between the traditional English ballad form and the eight-bar blues, which resulted in rock ‘n’ roll.

The Hollywood Jews found the expansion of the Los Angeles aqueduct, a colossal land-and-resource grab, orchestrated by the Chandler-Otis dynasty centred in downtown LA, whose chief propagandist, Charles Fletcher Lummis, walked all the way to southern California from Ohio in 1884. Colonel Otis, the then owner of the LA Times, was so impressed by this 143-day odyssey that he made Lummis the City Editor. Lummis went on to found a literary salon, the ‘Arroyo Set’, which synergised the virtues of open-air living and revivalist domestic architecture, in much the same way their contemporaries, the pre-Raphaelites, jammed together guild socialism and the neo-gothic.

But why — I hear you think — the preoccupation with the novel, specifically with novels about Hollywood? Surely with this extreme plethora of visual representation to choose from, prose fiction is the least effective means of understanding the psychogeography of Los Angeles? Lummis walked to Los Angeles — he therefore knew exactly where it was. His was an eotechnic grasp on the tyranny of distance; all subsequent Hollywood imagineers came by rail, or train, or road. And, as Rousseau observed, we think at walking pace, while we conceive of prosody in terms of metric feet. When writers describe Autopia their prose becomes necessarily filmic, like this from Joan Didion’s 1970 Hollywood novel, Play It as It Lays: ‘She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and, just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs roar overhead at seventy miles an hour.’

Would it be stretching an analogy too far into a methodology if I were to suggest that the only way to discover the psycho-spatial relation between Los Angeles and Hollywood was to re-enact that great syncretism with my own person? I had walked to New York in partial emulation of my maternal grandfather, Isaac, son of the Rabbi Yehuda Zalkind, whose bald account of his emigration to the new world in the 1890s was scrawled in the back of his prayer book thus: ‘I left Romshishiak Falk Havana on September 11, 1888. I came to America November 26, 1888 on Wednesday.’ A bald progression of places: Romshishiak — Falk — Havana.

When I say walked, I had, in point of fact, walked from my house in Stockwell, south London, to Heathrow, then flown to JFK, then walked into Manhattan through East New York and Brooklyn. Nevertheless, such was the primacy of muscle fatigue over mental conception, and so much of a jump-cut is intercontinental jet flight, that when I arrived I felt as if the two landmasses were one.

Like the Hollywood moguls, mine would be a quest in search of the movies; however, while they hurried to attend its birth, I would be in search of the deathbed of cinema. By covering every inch of ground between my home and Heathrow, then eschewing wheeled transport for the entire duration of my week in Los Angeles, I would be able to throw off the banjaxed topography of the cut, pan, zoom, track, close-up and wide-angle, whether of camera lens or car windscreen. I would be able to encounter Baldwin Hills, Crenshaw, West Adams, South Central, Downtown, Echo Park, Wilshire Boulevard, Melrose, in 360-degree surround sight, sound, touch and smell, arriving in Hollywood footsore but possessed of an insight not privileged to anyone since Charles Foster Lummis presented himself to Colonel Otis.

And then I would press on, into the Hollywood Hills, along Mullholland Drive, down Laurel Canyon, along Sunset Boulevard, through Beverly Hills, past Hillcrest Country Club down to Culver City and the MGM Studios. And on to Santa Monica, and thence Venice, before traversing the Boleno wetlands, until eventually I regained the airport. In all, a 120-mile circumambulation of the Los Angeles basin, taking in all of Banham’s four ecologies, and ritualistically emptying out the Sargossa of Hollywood’s dreams as only a wandering demi-Jew could.

And I did. What was it like? Well, you’ll have to wait for the main feature to find out, when my account of the walk is published in book form next year. This has only been the trailer.

Will Self is the author of seven novels (the most recent of which The Butt is published in paperback in May), five collections of short stories, and three novellas. He has contributed extensively to a plethora of publications over the years, and four collections of his journalism have been published. He lives in London with his wife, the journalist Deborah Orr

Benjamin Nugent is the author of American Nerd: The Story of My People. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Time, n+1 and Nextbook.