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.

Jabotinsky: (pouring for him) Careful. This is very strong vodka sent over by a priest in the Urals. Only this can stoke the fires of my soul when I’m writing.

Ben Gurion: Since when does your soul need stoking with vodka to produce another attack on me and my party? I though your writing was effortless.

Jabotinsky: True, attacking you and your party I can do in my sleep. But look, this is Russian, not Hebrew (shows him the papers) and it belongs to my alternative universe, my novel. My solace and refuge from the bickerings of the Jews.

Ben Gurion: (looking at the papers) May I? This is the novel itself…? The Five?

Jabotinsky: How do you know about “The Five”?

Ben Gurion: Berl Katzenelson read some chapters in a Russian magazine and ordered me to study them before our meeting. He wanted me to have an insight into your soul.

Jabotinsky: Ordered? Berl Katzenelson can order you?

Ben Gurion: Definitely. Berl may be a year younger than me but he holds a spiritual and moral authority over me. He’s a teacher, guide and true brother who seeks no power for himself, and even when he disagrees with me or votes against me, I’m always sure of his confidence in my leadership. Amongst your followers, have you anyone like Berl?

Jabotinsky: Sadly, my followers are too keen to follow. Too faithful, too unquestioning. I have to be my own “Berl”.

Ben Gurion: What about Uri Zvi Greenberg? He may have defected from my labour movement but I still admire his poetry.
Jabotinsky: Uri Zvi Greenberg isn’t a moral or a spiritual authority. He’s a hysterical, humourless man still haunted by the trauma of the trenches. And I’ll let you in to a secret – unlike you, I’m not keen on his poetry. As a rule I don’t think poets and authors are useful in public life, in the end their concern is for books and poems and scholarship. Take care of Berl, he’s a precious asset. He was in the Jewish Brigade I founded, in the Great War. We had our disagreements, but I’ll always value him as a man of truth worth.

Ben Gurion: You know, although Berl objects to me making a secret deal with you, he still supported our agreement against all its opponents. He’s even more concerned than I am by the prospect of a civil war in Eretz Yisrael.

Jabotinsky: I’m afraid of that too, but if you insist on maintaining your stranglehold on Zionism, we have no option but to liberate it forcefully from your grip.

Ben Gurion: Our stranglehold? How? By building settlements and factories? Establishing kibbutzim?
Jabotinsky: Slow down, slow down. (places a cautious arm on Ben Gurion’s shoulder) Will you tell me what you and Berl thought of my first chapters?

Ben Gurion: I took it lightly; it amused me that the Duce could be lovesick. But Berl found it profoundly disturbing.
Jabotinsky: Disturbing? Why?

Ben Gurion: Because if these imaginary, assimilated Jews in your turn-of-the-century Odessa really are so liberated and confident, so well-loved and accepted in their Gentile surroundings, Berl is convinced they’ll meet a bitter end.

Jabotinsky: A bitter end?

Ben Gurion: He thinks you’re setting us up for a reversal later, when all their joy and levity will end in doom and destruction.

Jabotinsky: Is that what he said? What intuition…

Ben Gurion: (surprised) But how can they be doomed? You’re the author, you control their fate. Why would you choose to be cruel?

Jabotinsky: Ben Gurion, it’s history that is cruel. The next chapters will bring the revolution; the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin followed by the World War. You know better than most that when the Gentiles revolt it’s the Jews who pay the price.

Ben Gurion is silent. He picks up a page from the table, browses.

Ben Gurion: And will Marussiah finally succumb to the author’s loving advances?

Jabotinsky: (laughs) Not the author, my friend, the narrator. The author doesn’t need the love of a fictional character. He has his own beloved woman to whom he has striven to be faithful for many years.

Ben Gurion: All right, the narrator…

Jabotinsky: The narrator will never capture Marussiah’s heart. She’ll leave her Gentile lover and marry the dull pharmacist chosen by her parents… and finally, in the end… she will be set alight by her kitchen stove.

Ben Gurion: Set alight? How can you give her such a terrible ending?
Jabotinsky: (impatient) That’s enough now! I got carried away. An author should never reveal his plot before it’s written. Half the time the characters ignore his will anyway. But we didn’t arrange this final meeting to debate prose. If reports from Tel Aviv are to be trusted, your comrades are planning to reject our little agreement, just as I predicted in Rutenberg’s hotel room. So we should use this meeting to define the rules of engagement for the battle that will now rage in the Zionist Federation.

Ben Gurion: (pensive) You return to Paris tomorrow?

Jabotinsky: Yes. Where will you be heading?

Ben Gurion: Home, to Tel Aviv.

Jabotinsky: Alas, Tel Aviv…Jerusalem…they haunt my dreams. But before we dive into our last argument, you’re still my guest and it would be wrong to contest a hungry rival. Come, have a look, our hostess left us a few dishes…

Ben Gurion: No, I’m not hungry, not for cooked food. I wouldn’t say no to a slice of bread.

Jabotinsky: Just bread…?

Ben Gurion: Well, perhaps with an egg of some sort…

Jabotinsky: An egg? What sort of egg?

Ben Gurion: Fried, maybe an omelette if that’s possible…

Jabotinsky: (embarrassed) To be honest… in the kitchen I’m completely helpless. Opening a tin of sardines makes me as proud as if I had personally erected a steel bridge across the Volga.

Ben Gurion: I’ll do the frying. In Sejera we had this huge pan and I’d make omelettes for the whole crowd. When Paula lets me, I have a rare talent for it; I just flip it at the perfect moment so it’s neither watery or burnt dry. Do you think we can rustle up a few eggs in this place?

Jabotinsky: (enthusiastic) Of course, we must find some eggs and you can demonstrate your hidden talent for frying, although it’s not just eggs that you fry to perfection – you do the same in politics, flipping people and ideas about without burning a single one.

They go to the corner of the kitchen, light a large flame in the stove. Ben Gurion prepares the omelette while Jabotinsky sits at the table watching, amused and beguiled.

Jabotinsky: So I have a question for you. Let’s assume we have our Jewish State and its Prime Minister, whomever he is, invites you to join the Cabinet. Which Ministry would attract you the most?

Ben Gurion: I’d start a Ministry for Identity.

Jabotinsky: Is there such a thing?

Ben Gurion: No, but it will be essential. We need a Ministry to straighten out our poor old Jewish identity that’s been crippled by centuries of exile. At the heart of it I would plant the words of the Prophets.

Jabotinsky: What a bold idea. It would tempt me too, although I might straighten out the warped Jewish identity in a rather different way. So if I were to join this cabinet I’d choose an easier role.

Ben Gurion: That being?

Jabotinsky: Secretary for Defence, Minister of War.

Ben Gurion: Minister of War? You, Jabotinsky? The poet, the author, the orator…

Steam is rising from the stove and there is a scorching smell.

Jabotinsky: Yes, because my wars would be shorter and more efficient than any waged by you Socialists. Fewer dead, fewer injured, less destruction on both sides.

Ben Gurion: How?

Jabotinsky: Because I wouldn’t let a single Jew or Arab harbour false illusions. I wouldn’t offer the Arabs a compromise that they won’t accept. I would speak to them clearly and honestly, without guile. They’re neither wicked nor foolish, as your friends in the Brotherhood of Nations might fancy. From the minute our feet touched the ground of Eretz Yisrael, they’ve known what our intentions are. Like some posturing virgin we persist in denying the fact that from its inception the Zionist Movement has carried in its womb the embryonic Jewish state. But the Arabs spotted this long ago and as they awake from four hundred years of Ottoman-induced slumber they will ensure that this embryo dies, along with its mother. If we don’t rush to deliver the Jewish state, this baby will die in the womb or be delivered stillborn to the English. Or it will be born a monster.

Ben Gurion: A monster???

Jabotinsky: Ambivalence, procrastination, religious extremists from all sides and enemies of Zionism will turn it into a monster. That’s why we need a state as soon as possible. An independent sovereign state with clearly charted borders and a wall of steel before its enemies. But within in: generosity, equality and respect for all. An outward wall of steel but from the inside, velvet-covered marble, embellished with images of hope.

Ben Gurion slides the omelette from the frying pan onto a tray, divides it in two, places each on a plate and starts to eat hungrily. He suddenly throws down his knife and fork.

Ben Gurion: There’s no such thing as steel on the outside and velvet on the inside! You’ve been away from Eretz Yisrael for so long you’ve lost touch with reality. We in the workers’ parties are trying, slowly and carefully, to separate the Arabs and ourselves by securing Jewish labour in Jewish enterprises and building separate Jewish settlements in uninhabited areas. Yes, Sir, another acre and another goat, but the time is not yet ripe for the Jewish State. If we induce this premature infant of yours, the Arabs will destroy it and the English will let them, because then they won’t be responsible for our security. You’ve have been gone too long, you don’t know the situation.

Jabotinsky: And you are completely alienated from European Jewry! You have no concept of the new nationalistic anti-Semitism that’s poisoning the air. When you and your friends finally decide the time is right to bring the Jewish state into the world you’ll be too late – not enough Jews will survive.

Ben Gurion: You speak with such cruel pessimism.

Jabotinsky: It’s reality.

Ben Gurion: A leader can’t allow himself to be controlled by pessimism.

Jabotinsky: It’s easy for you, you’ve already changed your identity. You have no need for your Ministry. You’re not a Jew, you’re an Eretz Yisraelite, a Palestinian.

Ben Gurion: Maybe I am, and that’s why I see the world from the perspective of my small patch of land.

Jabotinsky: The Jews included?

Ben Gurion: Especially the Jews. Whose home are we in?

Jabotinsky: The Yaacobi’s, Shlomo and Edna, dear, loyal friends. Unlike you, I have no machine to arrange my travel and lodgings. I depend on the good will of my friends.

Ben Gurion: So come, instead of walking out on the Zionist movement, join us in a grand coalition. We’ll give you the Ministry of Information, we’ll be partners on other matters. You’ll have inside influence and this “machine” you so admire will look after your travel and lodgings.

Jabotinsky: You may be sincere, Ben Gurion, but I won’t subjugate my views for your purist comrades. You speak for a mere two percent of the Jewish people while I speak for millions in Eastern Europe, in Poland, Lithuania and Galicia, in Austria and Russia… Why should we join you? You join us!

A knock at the door.

Translation by Dr David Janner-Klausner Adapted for stage by Amy Rosenthal

The New Israel Fund celebrates Israel’s 64th Independence Day with the British premiere of A. B. Yehoshua’s new play: Can Two Walk Together? 6.30 pm, Thursday 10 May 2012 at the Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole St, W1 Ticket: £25 Patron Ticket: £45 (incl priority seating)

Book online at www.newisraelfund.org.uk or call 0207 724 2266
The Tel Aviv premiere will take place in May 2012

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.

Granta • 2012

There are plenty of reasons why Joseph Roth might have made a fitful letter-writer. When he wasn’t being whipped on by penury to compose feuilletons — those considered responses to people and places, things and happenings that remind us just how high journalism can soar — he was trying to sneak time to write his novels, managing sixteen in as many years, all interesting and several truly great. Then there was the fact that he lived his life in hotels and out of suitcases, shuttling back and forth between Germany and France, reporting also from Poland, Russia, Italy and Albania. All his writing was done at café tables or — increasingly as the years went on — bars. Somehow, his daunting prolificacy never did much to remedy his precarious finances, and funds would still become so scarce that even a stamp seemed a significant expense.

Roth could have used any one of these excuses. In fact, he used them all and more besides, fretting continually about his ailing health, his tattered concentration, the unreliability of the postal service. Yet in spite of these very real impediments, he left behind a sizeable cache of correspondence, a generous selection of which has now been translated into English for the first time by Michael Hofmann, the poet-translator whose clear-eyed, sharp- tongued devotion has been the making of Roth’s posthumous English-language reputation.

Four hundred and fifty-seven letters in total, they range from warm jottings to family and friends (“Liver flushed with calvados. Otherwise OK”) to beguiling reflections on the writer’s craft (“I dread misprints, two jumped up at me now like fleas from the type”). There is kindness to be found (as in a letter written on the passing of a friend’s father), but an abundance of bile and misery, too. Roth tested his friendships to their limits and his letters will test his fans equally. As early as 1930, he confesses “I find the politics quite paralyzing. It’s so hard to write. I have no money, I mean really NO MONEY, I get by on 5 marks a day. And I’m drinking. And my strength is fading.” Later, nearing the end of his wretchedly abbreviated life with the world erupting around him, he can come across as a terrible caricature of the male writer — dyspeptic, drunken, insecure to the point of neediness. And so, while Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters shores up his literary celebrity, it raises questions, too — questions about our enduring infatuation with that cosmopolitan, doomed Central-European Jewish culture whose golden age coincided with the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; questions about the role of the translator as self-appointed custodian; questions about our appetite for the details of authors’ off-the-page lives.

Moses Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in Brody, Galicia. When he headed West to the University of Vienna, he shrugged off his accent and first name in favour of his second and a more worldly mien. His identity remains mutable — he is ‘Red Roth’ briefly, Muh to his wife, even pledging a return to Moses. Politically, he is a man of contradictions and about-turns, a socialist and a monarchist both, a pacifist who enlists in the army. He plays fast and loose with fact, too, decorating his wartime service as a pen-pushing private with claims that he was a lieutenant and a prisoner of war in Russia. “For the past 25 years I’ve been living as a sort of fantastic figment,” he writes to his newspaper colleague, Benno Reifenberg from Vienna’s Hotel Imperial in the summer of 1928. (By the letter’s close he has already been forced to find new lodgings — the hotel was too expensive.)

In an age such as our own, when privacy’s perimeters are so hotly contested and technology adds an impersonal note to even the most secretive correspondences, there’s a temptation to fetishise inky epistolary exchanges from the past. We look to letters to reveal their writer’s inner self. The logic of this yearning is flawed where authors are concerned — when they write to their friends and family, they may be off duty but they are still using words in the best way they know how — to manipulate their reader’s emotions, to fabulate. Not that this posturing isn’t revealing in its own way. In the earliest of Roth’s letters, written to younger cousins, his big-brotherly bravado is touching. Of missives written when he was just 25, Hofmann notes: “These are the only letters in which Roth sounds young, in fact like a young shuttlecock: frisky and agile, youthfully pompous or light-heartedly pugnacious. You won’t hear it again.” And nor do you. Even at 30, Roth is to be found signing himself “Your old Joseph Roth.”

In 1922, he married Friederike Reichler, a beautiful girl from Vienna who was stylish but shy and far too fragile to keep pace with Roth’s restless itinerancy. As she soon learnt, to be with Roth was to be without him. Early on in their marriage, she wrote a late-night letter to Roth’s cousin, Paula Grubel, ending with a postscript: “12 o’clock already, and Muh’s still not back, what do you say to that?! Shocking!!!!”

This is one of the few letters neither by nor to Roth but about him, and it’s telling that Hofmann has found it necessary to include it here, to illustrate what should have been one of the most intimate relationships in Roth’s life. Moreover, the excitability of its postscript strikes him as an ominous sign of the troubles that lay ahead. By 1928, Friedl, was showing signs of mental imbalance, and Roth had embarked upon the process of searching for a diagnosis and cure for her. It was enormously costly — emotionally as well as materially. In the spring of 1929, he confessed to a Germanist friend, Pierre Bertaux, “her present illness is only an acuter version of her chronic weakness, a complete lack of resistance, in which I am not without blame. There are various causes. These things, of which I have been unable to speak for months, if not for years, oppress me more than the form of the illness itself.”

But even as Roth’s letters waltz around his guilt, they are invariably composed someplace far from Vienna (he was writing to Bertaux from Paris), where he leaves Friedl with her family. Eventually, other women fill her place, beginning with a virgin in the South of France (“three Catholic hymens before the real one” he joshes boastfully). Only on the rare occasions when Friedl shows improvement does he really consider the state of their union. What would her recovery mean — must he then return to her? It was never to be. In 1933, she was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia and placed in a sanatorium in Vienna, where the Third Reich’s eugenics programme saw to it that she was murdered in 1940, a year after Roth drank himself to death in Paris at the age of 44.

The bulk of these letters have a professional aspect. His correspondence is dominated in the early part of his career by his relationship with colleagues at The Frankfurter Zeitung, and latterly by his friendship with his patron, the bestselling novelist and memoirist Stefan Zweig. When writers talk shop, they do not delineate narrative arcs or debate the importance of place, they talk about advances and sales figures. Roth and co are no different. In between the numbers, he solicits other publishers behind his editor’s back, dashes his own novels and critiques others. Journalists, needless to say, are infinitely worse, and Roth’s fractious relationship with The Frankfurter Zeitung is, Hofmann concedes, one of “the burdens of this correspondence,” a burden that is conveyed here with tedious faithfulness, showcasing Roth at his most antagonistic and intransigent.

But journalism also occasioned one of his happiest periods. In 1925 his newspaper sent him to France, where he found a happiness he had never before known. It irradiates his letters, going quite to his head in a way that nothing else does. As he insists to Reifenberg that May, “I am writing to you in full possession of my skeptical faculties, with all my wits about me, and running the risk of making a fool of myself, which is just about the worst thing that could happen to me. I feel driven to inform you personally that Paris is the capital of the world, and you must come here. Whoever has not been here is only half human.”

It would end badly when the paper replaced him as their Paris correspondent, but France gave him something that could not be taken away: an unclouded view of post-WWI Germany as a country to fear and to hate. We may turn to letters in search of private revelations, but it is the public sphere that Roth’s from this era illuminate. It’s one of the qualities that makes his fiction and reportage so compelling, of course — that acute political foresight. In 1923, he became the first writer to use Hitler’s name in fiction. Later, he was in Berlin when Hitler was elected Chancellor. He packed his suitcases and boarded a train for Paris that same day, never to return. “It will have become clear to you now that we are heading for a great catastrophe,” he writes to Zweig a fortnight later.

Though his books were banned and burned in Germany, leaving him a writer without a readership, Roth was dead before the grotesque horror of that great catastrophe was fully known. Joan Acocella made the point in a New Yorker essay some years ago that “His portraits of Jews therefore lack the pious edgelessness of most post-Holocaust writing.” It’s what makes Roth’s portraits of Nazi anti-Semitism so arresting, she notes. Here in the letters, he plays fast and loose with anti-Semitic tropes. “In matters of health and money, prominent Jews are always a good idea. Jewish doctors are a kind of atonement for the crucifixion,” he tells one gentile friend. In other instances, though the irony is missing — it smacks merely of self- hatred.

Our fascination with Roth gestures to something larger, though. It’s part of our fixation with the artistic flowering embodied by Austria- Hungary’s Jewish authors, with an inherited nostalgia for the Empire that produced them and that fleeting historical moment when justly feared nationalism was eclipsed by something approaching unity. The appeal of this era also has to do with the densely layered identities enfolded into the fictions it produced, and with its melting-pot cultural and linguistic vitality. It seems cosmopolitan and edgy in a way that at once resonates with our globalised world and makes it feel a flatter, greyer place. Hofmann is hyper-sensitive to the way the publishing industry capitalises on our visceral urge to reconnect with this. Roth, he insists, is a talent robust enough to stand on his own — unlike Zweig, his patron, whose resurgent popularity he attributes to Pushkin Press’s “nice paper and pretty formats”. In recent years, Hofmann has mounted vicious and virtuoso attacks on Zweig, most memorably in the London Review of Books where he referred to the author as “the uniquely dreary and clothy sprog of the electric 1880s.” He’s only warming to his theme. “Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He’s the Pepsi of Austrian writing. He is the one whose books made films,” Hofmann goes on — and on.

Even here, as an editor-translator, he lets his disparagement creep into footnotes, inserting himself throughout Roth’s correspondence with Zweig like a jealous spouse. “I never think of money matters when I think of you — that’s a complex of yours that you must shrug off,” Zweig tells Roth in 1934. Hofmann immediately qualifies “never”, adding: “when the writer Joseph Breitbach told SZ in 1935 that he was lending money to JR, Zweig warned him that it would cost him his friendship with Roth.” It’s faintly unseemly — you feel you should look away and yet can’t.

In the absence of a serious biography of Roth in English, Hofmann’s distilled introductions — both here and to novels and volumes of reportage — remain the most cogent appraisal we have of Roth’s talent. Rewarding though these letters collectively are, it’s hard not to wish that Hofmann had cast aside his translator’s reserve and devoted his energies to a longer study instead. Then again, perhaps the letters tell us as much as we need to know: they remind us that Roth’s true living was done on the pages of his novels and newspapers columns. We flock to see authors in the flesh at literary festivals and seize upon literary biographies, but their finest – and, unwittingly, their truest, most private – selves are invariably to be found in what they publish.

Judaism: A Way of Being

by David Gelernter

Yale University Press • 2009

Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love

by William Kolbrener

Continuum • 2011

I blame Jonathan Sacks. Across his oeuvre he has pioneered a style of writing about Judaism designed to put even the most refined gentile Englishman at ease. Beautifully written, his work weaves in philosophy, literature and history, giving the impression of a writer who draws upon all the wisdom of the world, seeking truth wherever it may be found. Naturally the Judaism portrayed is of a relatively orthodox variety; but this style and breadth of reference gives the reader the sense that Judaism is not dogmatic or parochial; rather it is tune with the best of humanistic and rational thought; [authentic] Judaism is both timeless and utterly relevant to the modern condition. Sometimes the philosophy is a little woolly, the logic slightly questionable, but we are swept along by the quality of the prose and the frequent anecdotes, designed to dig the Chief Rabbi out of whatever intellectual hole he may have dug himself into.

As a result of his undisputed success, Sacks has spawned a line of imitators, each displaying prose of impeccable quality, littered with philosophical and literary references. William Kolberener is the latest in this dynasty, and is rewarded for his efforts by a fulsome endorsement from the master on the back cover. Kolbrener, according to Sacks “engages in conversation with the timeless texts of the Torah [and] the result is both enlightening and enthralling.” While Kolbrener indeed sets out to engage in a conversation between classical Jewish texts and wider intellectual currents, the dialogue is frequently a one-sided one. Demonstrating his breadth of knowledge, Kolbrener references a diverse array of writers and thinkers: Wittgenstein, Hobbes, Descartes, Freud, Niels Bohr and Sophocles among others. These voices however, are rarely used to demonstrate an insight from which the tradition can learn. They either reinforce Jewish tradition or present an opposing view, which is then shown to be wrong. Either way, Judaism, or at least Kolbrener’s version of it, always wins. In Isaac’s Bad Rap T.S. Eliot is depicted as believing that “a classic is not the work that begins a literary tradition, but the one that allows for the tradition’s continuity”. So Eliot is supportive of Jewish textuality; this would have been a surprise to the notoriously antisemitic poet. In Modernity and Hell, Korah and Hobbes, the eponymous philosopher, who believed that “brute power provides the only barrier to endless war” fails to understand the possibility of Judaic conflict management in which “disputes for the sake of heaven” can be resolved because “these and these are the words of the living God.” Jewish reformists do little better: Prayer and the People sees Kolbrener baffled by the Reform movement’s attempt to create a contemporary liturgy that “reflects our values and ideals” — far better to stick with the (apparently heaven-sent) traditional siddur, ideally in the version edited and introduced by Jonathan Sacks.

There are, of course, several iterations of the classic Sacksian trope: clever Israel and the stupid Greeks. ‘Lighting Up; The Beauty of Hanukah’ sees the “Greek scoffers reducing everything to the laws of nature” as opposed to the Hanukah lamp that leads to “continuous recognition of the miraculous character of the every day”. Torah and the Pleasure Principle contrasts Greek thinkers who ‘stand outside’, relying on ‘rational principles’ and the sages of the Talmud who ‘think with their hearts.’ This is feel-good knockabout masquerading as philosophical reflection; whatever the rhetoric of Hanukah, the long history of Greek speaking Jewish communities, centred in Alexandria demonstrate centuries of Greek-Jewish synthesis; Judaism as we experience it today has been inescapably shaped by Hellenism. Open Minded Torah creates a superficial feeling of intellectual cosmopolitanism in which Judaism is in dialogue with the great ideas of modernity and western civilisation, but the wider sources function as a series of straw men whose all too easy rebuttal is designed to assure the reader of Judaism’s intellectual sophistication and superiority.

The idea of a work that weaves high- level Jewish scholarship around everyday life events is a powerful one. Unfortunately though, Kolbrener misses the opportunity to say something profound about Judaism and modernity. Modern Jews are in genuine need of unflinching analyses of the possible ways a rethought and renewed Judaism might offer an intellectually credible path in contemporary society. The requirement however, is not for writings that blithely assert the superiority of the Hebraic over the Hellenistic but instead, as Levinas suggested, bring Athens and Jerusalem into a genuine dialogue of equals.

If Kolbrener is Sacks’ direct descendant, David Gelernter is his wayward bastard child. The elegant prose is present, the literary and philosophical references (Kant, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Newton, Chesterton et al) utilised, the attempt to answer head on the great questions of life in a language accessible to the secular reader. But while Kolbrener’s view of Judaism represents a fairly mainstream Modern Orthodox position, Gelernter portrays a Jewish orthodoxy that he seems to have dreamed up himself. Gelernter writes extensively of the ‘Torat Halev’ (Torah of the heart); the term is used so frequently and with such assumed authority that the reader might imagine it to be rabbinic in origin; it is in fact a moniker of Gelernter’s invention. The hubristically titled Judaism presents itself as nothing short of a contemporary Mishneh Torah, with its author a latter day Maimonides. Gelernter declares his hand in the Preface: he is writing about a “common”,“normative”, “full strength, straight up; no water, no soda aged in oak for three thousand years” Judaism, which he identifies as “Orthodox”. This is a discomfiting start to all who view the Judaic tradition as diverse, plural and having been radically changed throughout its history; we, presumably, are practicing a Judaism more akin to cheap white wine. Gelernter sees as inadequate approaches to Judaism that focus on the particular; he wishes to move beyond specific aspects of Judaism in order to reinstate “the grand scheme itself: the picture that encompasses all these elements; the underlying idea.” While Gelernter doesn’t quite say that only he can access this God’s- eye perspective he comes pretty close. Not for Gelernter the approach of summarising “current thinking among theologians and philosophers of Judaism”, instead: “I attempt to summarise Judaism itself ”.

The main body of the book is split into four extended meditations: Separation; on halacha, Veil; on an ineffable transcendent deity, Perfect Asymmetry; on women and marriage, and Inward Pilgrimage; on the problem of evil. Perfect Asymmetry is by far the weakest: in attempting to justify a conservative position on gender roles and relations Gelernter sounds like a tea-party moralist and an apologist for some of Judaism’s most offensively patriarchal texts. Despite this, the other chapters work fairly successfully as free flowing, romantic ruminations on Jewish practice and texts, inventing new metaphorical and mythical frameworks to understand and promote Judaism. There is nothing wrong with this romanticism; the beauty of the prose and the novelty of some of the ideas make for engaging reading. What is problematic is the insistence that Judaism is homogenous, coherent and unchanging along with an accompanying insistence that said Judaism is defined, not by its classical texts, but by David Gelernter’s idiosyncratic understanding. Where there is a minor text that fits his viewpoint it is elevated to the status of ‘authentic Judaism’; where there is a major one that gets in the way it is treated as an aberration or an accident of history.

There are moments, however, where Gelernter goes further and presents ‘normative’ Judaism in ways that simply beggar belief. An especially unhinged appendix on Jewish and Christian ethics contains a series of remarkable claims on Judaism’s approach to violence: ‘In Judaism pacifism is immoral;…’Jewish morality is warrior morality. It is no accident that Abraham, Moses, and David, the Bible greatest heroes should all have been described as warriors… Judah Maccabee…frequently cited in Medieval Europe as the model of a Godly and chivalrous knight.’ Any familiarity with pre-modern Judaism would reveal this to be nonsense — most rabbinic and medieval texts display strong hostility to violence, an attitude which seeped through society and led Jewish communities to be famously passive and non- violent. Gelernter’s normative Judaism then is not ‘orthodoxy’ nor is it historically grounded: it is the ideal Judaism of Commentary magazine, where Zionism is central, social morality conservative, and God’s role is ultimately to let you ‘preserve the morality you already accept’.

Jonathan Sacks’ ultimate tragedy is the wasting of his gifts. An impressive knowledge of philosophy and a talent for elegant prose are squandered because of a need to tow the party line and defend a Modern Orthodox status quo. These two books are no less missed opportunities; while Kolbrener fails to take on board any lessons from non-Jewish sources, Gelernter’s obsession with depicting an essential and authentic Judaism leads him to downplay his own innovation and distort evidence to fit his goals. With such exquisite writing, knowledge of classic Jewish texts and broad frame of literary reference both writers could have produced works of transformative scope that point towards future Judaisms. As it stands, both, despite their tremendous sophistication, are works of apologetics.

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.

By Gilad Atzmon

Zero Books 2011

Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights

By David Landy

Zed Books 2011

So contested has the issue of antisemitism become and so promiscuously is the term used that it is increasingly difficult tofind clarity amid the fog of frenzied debate. The publication of these two recent books provides a much needed opportunity to map out exactly where the borderline between disillusionment with Israel, anti-Zionism and antisemitism actually lies.

David Landy, an Irish-Jewish academic and Palestinian solidarity activist offers a sympathetic but not uncritical analysis of Jewish pro-Palestinian activism, based on extensive interviews. Through these he demonstrates that ‘Israel critical Jews’, as he calls them, are often motivated by a desire to reclaim their Jewish identity from Zionism, and it is through pro-Palestinian activism that many have actually come closer to their Jewishness. Further, some see themselves as providing a kind of guard against anti-Semitism within the wider pro-Palestinian movement. In these respects, most of Landy’s interviewees refute the criticism often made that Israel critical Jews are cynically ‘using’ their Jewishness.

The book raises complex questions about Jewish activists: Should they concentrate on convincing other Jews and transforming the Jewish community? Should they support groups within Israel itself? Should Jews support the Palestinians as Jews at all? Should Palestinians be the ones to set the agenda for activism? These are difficult questions, and the seriousness and sensitivity with which Landy and his interviewees address them does them credit, even if one disagrees (as I do) with some of the positions they take.

Israel critical Jews are subject to vituperative criticism from other Jews. They are accused of treachery, of being superficial ‘AsAJews’ and — most seriously — of being apologists for antisemitic anti-Zionism. Sometimes these accusations have merit and sometimes they are simply part of a self-perpetuating circle of intra-Jewish conflict. Amid these inflamed passions, the recent controversy over Gilad Atzmon’s now notorious book The Wandering Who?  superficially looks like another example of an Israel critical Jew being hung out to dry. In fact, Atzmon is a very different character and much more than a Jewish anti-Zionist.

The Wandering Who? is full of bluster, pompous verbiage and heroic posturing as Atzmon, an acclaimed jazz saxophonist and one of the disillusioned, self-exiled Israelis whose creative cynicism enriches the British cultural scene, seeks to explain his total rejection of Jewish identity. His argument is based upon the premise that Jews fall into three types: ‘those who follow Judaism’, ‘those who regard themselves as human beings who happen to be of Jewish origin’ and ‘those who put their Jewish-ness over and above all of their other traits’. The first two types are ‘harmless and innocent’ but ‘third category’ Jews are the real ‘problem’.

For Atzmon, in the post-emancipation era it is positively archaic and poisonous for Jews to maintain their ‘tribal’, marginal identities. Atzmon claims to be against what he considers the ‘myth’ of identity, and any kind of minority identity politics. We are all nothing more than human beings. While such a monolithic universalism may be oppressive and in any case unachievable, it doesn’t have to be anti-Semitic as any group identity would be invalid. But Atzmon only singles out one other group for his opprobrium — separatist lesbian feminists — and refrains from mentioning any other ethnic, religious or national minority identity as problematic. It seems that it is only Jews that destructively cling on to their identities.  By clinging onto Jewish identity, ‘third category’ Jews become part of a global network that ‘is all about commitment, one that pulls more and more Jews into an obscure, dangerous and unethical fellowship’. Zionism is just one part of a ‘unique political identity’ that is responsible for Western expansionism, and even the credit crunch (which Atzmon calls the ‘Ziopunch’).  Ultimately, Jews care only for achieving power and dominance, through Zionism and other means.

Atzmon reserves his greatest contempt for secular, left-wing, anti-Zionist Jews.  To campaign for universal values while identifying as a Jew is contradictory at best and mendacious at worst. To campaign as a Jew for the Palestinians and against Zionism is to automatically invalidate one’s own argument.  Since Jewish identity is the cause of Palestinian oppression, it cannot contribute to Palestinian liberation. Only through the renunciation of Jewish identity can those who are born Jewish bring peace and justice to the world.

Atzmon argues that the politics of anti-Zionist Jews, neo-cons and every other kind of Jew are simply part of one interdependent Jewish political identity, engendered by what Atzmon calls the ‘holocaust religion’. This predates the actual holocaust (which in any case Atzmon appears to be skeptical about, while not actually denying) assuming the latter actually took place and is a religion based upon an imagined fear of gentile hostility designed to perpetuate separation of the Jews from the rest of humanity. The holocaust religion, according to Atzmon, requires Jews to infiltrate all of society and politics. Jewish anti-Zionists and neo-cons alike are simply ensuring that Jews cover all the bases in their quest for political ubiquity.

The book is a peculiar mix of polemic, philosophising and personal narrative which creates a veneer of radicalism and up to date thinking. But, beneath it all, Atzmon is more conventional that he thinks he is. Ultimately, The Wandering Who? boils down to a number of hoary old anti-semitic tropes:

When Jews appear to be assimilating, they are really infiltrating and subverting.

When Jews identify themselves as Jews, they are primitive separatists.

Jews are obsessively concerned with attaining power and influence.

Jews are responsible for the hatred they attract.

The holocaust myth is simply a Jewish strategy to gain power through the world’s guilt.  The Wandering Who? is an anti-Semitic book certainly, but is it a dangerous book? So ludicrous are his arguments and so pompous is his tone that it is tempting to dismiss Atzmon as a crank. More genuinely disturbing is the fact that this book was published at all. Zero Books is a small company that has published some excellent quirky philosophy and intellectually rigorous criticism; they should have seen the book for what it was. (The book is endorsed by figures like Richard Falk, John Mearsheimer and Karl Sabbagh who, while strong critics of Israel and Zionism, should have heard alarm bells ringing when they saw the chapter entitled ‘Swindler’s List’). Ironically, it is precisely Atzmon’s Jewish background that gains him this platform, providing an alibi for his antisemitism.

Perhaps Atzmon has done us a service by illustrating exactly where anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism. In fact, anti-Zionist Jews, like Tony Greenstein, are among Atzmon’s most severe critics. Perhaps agreement over Atzmon might even provide the basis for a productive dialogue on antisemitism between Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews.

To the extent that Landy’s book is mostly carefully argued and certainly not antisemitic, it is perhaps unfair to compare it to Atzmon’s.  But both of them demonstrate the weakness of a certain kind of contemporary Jewish critique of Jewishness: it develops in ignorance of Judaism and the contemporary Jewish world.  To give one example of both authors’ ignorance, Landy says that Reform Judaism ‘may be developing into a syncretic Judeo-Christian religion’ and Atzmon doesn’t acknowledge that it even exists in his blanket statement that ‘Judaism is a non-reformable religion’.  Atzmon sees the apparent divisions between Jews as irrelevant, and Landy lumps all Zionist Jews into one monolithic bloc. Landy’s caricature of the Jewish community as filled with fervent Zionists who live in denial of the Palestinian plight may not be as antisemitic as Atzmon’s caricature of Jews as a clan of power-crazed paranoids is, but they are both caricatures nonetheless.

It is vital that Jews, Judaism and Jewishness be subjected to critique in order to stay alive and dynamic. There is a long and distinguished history of Jewish heretics and mavericks, from Elisha Ben Abuya, through Spinoza to Walter Benjamin. But the ones who really made a mark were those who were steeped in the traditions they rebelled against. Critiques founded on ignorance and fantasies will always fail.

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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Headline Review 2011

The List by Martin Fletcher

Thomas Dunne Books 2011

In one way it’s curious that Anne Frank’s diary has become by far the most pre- eminent Holocaust text, because it is also the most oblique. Its power emanates from something never seen directly by its writer. Since the focus is primarily on the claustrophobic world of the secret annexe where the Dutch Frank family and their friends hid from the Nazis, there is a constant tension with what we as readers know about events taking place in the world outside, and what will happen in the future. We understand that all the daily indignities, deprivations and fear Anne describes were in vain — the Franks would be discovered and deported to Bergen-Belsen.

The massive literature which has blossomed since the diary’s first publication in 1947 has told us what Anne could only speculate about — laying bare the monstrosities of the Holocaust in chilling detail. The shootings, starvings, gassings, burnings, beatings and torture, the unbearable suffering and unimaginable cruelty. But where do we go once horror and pity have been utterly exhausted? The next chapter, at least for some writers, is a move back to the kind of obliqueness achieved by Anne Frank. To the before and the afterwards, to the scars of the survivors, to the ripples cast outward and onward. Two recent novels tackle the events from opposite chronological directions — one starting with the prelude to the war, and the other the fall-out from it. It’s an oblique approach which, in the right hands, has the quiet power to disturb.

The Booker long-listed Far to Go begins in the tense months before the war, when time is running out for the Bauer family. They are prosperous, secular Jews living in an unnamed Sudetenland town in 1938. In the growing turmoil, they will put their only son on the Kindertransport before ending up on transits to Birkenau. That alone would be a familiar story, but Pick tells her story simultaneously from different points in time, spinning a spider’s web of complexity and nuance.

Both in time and place we are at one remove from the events at the black heart of the novel. Everything is anchored within the Bauer household, with the bigger political developments mediated through a prism – the gaze of the Bauer’s faithful nanny Marta. It is she who learns about what’s happening in the world outside by listening to her employer discussing politics and who feels the consequences when her beloved charge, Pepik, is made to sit at the back of the class, or when he wets his bed. On Kristallnacht, she watches aghast from behind the curtains as Nazi thugs smash up and torch a Jewish shop, and beat the owner to death on the pavement outside.

But there’s more to this than Marta’s naïve perspective on ominous events in the world outside. For this becomes very much a book very much preoccupied with the emotional wasteland beyond the war. Inserted between the chapters of narrative are letters, only some of which are written by familiar characters. The only thing we know for certain about each is their death, as each ends in a similar way, ‘(FILE UNDER: Bauer, Rosa. Died Birkenau, 1943)’

Following each letter is a confessional passage from a contemporary speaker, whose identity we can only guess at, speaking directly to someone else. A survivor, but which survivor? And how does this mysterious historian fit into the story of the Bauers? Slowly the evidence mounts to a further twist in the plot, but we must unravel the layers and straighten out the ambiguities to find out what it is. This becomes a story of multiple betrayals and devastating guilt, a future overshadowed by the past, and lives consumed by gaping absences.

The story of the Bauer family alone would be just another, sadly familiar Holocaust tale. But Pick is less interested in the details of the Final Solution than in the psychological consequences for the survivors. Thrust onto a train, arriving in a strange country among unfamiliar people, cut off from all that was known and familiar. What were the consequences of such an experience? Guilt, of course, but she suggests something far worse than that. A life determined by absence, ‘The gnawing longing, the desire to keep searching even when your rational mind knows everyone involved is gone.’

It’s that very longing which is explored further in Martin Fletcher’s The List. The year is 1945 and Edith and Georg are a young married couple trying to rebuild their shattered lives in a boarding house in Swiss Cottage. Both have made narrow escapes from Vienna alone, leaving family and home behind as the Nazis tightened their stranglehold on Europe. Like Alison Pick’s Pepik, Edith has been pushed onto a train by loving parents.

Here again the action is anchored within a domestic setting, at a distance from the portentous events that are central to the plot. The lounge of the Goldhurst Terrace lodgings is a place where a group of young refugees living with the consequences of the Holocaust commiserate over a cup of rationed tea.

The murder of millions of Jews haunts the text, although the reader only catches an occasional glimpse of its reality in characters like Edith’s cousin Anna, a lost soul ‘strange and distant, blank’ who arrives unexpectedly in their world with her flashbacks and nightmares, her hair still close cropped and a livid tattoo on her arm. Instead, we are led to discover, through Georg and Edith, the coping mechanisms, the black humour and the investment in domestic life which makes the knowledge of the past bearable. Edith is pregnant, but her excitement about the new life within her acts a constant reminder of the family that she has lost.

The hinterland of Edith and Georg’s story is the catastrophe that has engulfed their country and annihilated their community, friends and family. The list of the title is kept by Georg, which contains the names of relatives he and Edith are hoping to find. Scouring the offices of the refugee charities and Jewish organisations for news of survivors from camps and ghettos, he gradually crosses off one name after another. Finally there are only two names left — Edith’s father and his sister. But nobody, in the chaos of post-war Europe, seems to know whether they are alive or not. In both books, the survivors are left clinging to paper relics of the past —Georg’s list, the letters of Far To Go, a single photograph kept by Pepik.

Martin Fletcher depicts a post-war Hampstead heaving with Jewish refugees who frequent the Finchleystrasse, eating at the Cosmo and Dorice restaurants, their nostalgia for home refracted through black humour while they grapple with the idiosyncrasies of their adopted country and wait for news. The waiting defines them, as Fletcher describes: ‘They were all living the same blocked life. They couldn’t go anywhere until they knew.’

The Swiss Cottage that Fletcher describes is familiar to many second generation refugee children, including me, but here its cosiness is shot through with bleakness. While the cheerful couple who run the boarding house, Sally and Albert Barnes, are welcoming and tolerant up to a point, the mood elsewhere in Hampstead is turning sour. With fascist yobs patrolling the streets, a petition is raised to have refugees deported in order to free up accommodation for demobbed soldiers.

As the temperature rises, events in Palestine add to the ferment. Terrorist gangs have targeted the British troops enforcing the mandate, and they have Sergeant Eric Barnes, son of Sally and Albert, in their sights. A living link between London and Palestine, his fate threatens the precarious new lives of the émigré community. More explosive still, the terrorists have decided to take the fight with the British on their home turf with a bold plan to shoot Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in Pall Mall. The political ramifications of a successful hit would be catastrophic for the Finchleystrasse circle.

With the pieces set in place, Fletcher brings it to a dramatic dénouement, plotting his double narrative with meticulous care against a grainy backdrop of post-war London. Martin Fletcher is a foreign correspondent with a distinguished track record in the Middle East, and he’s combined his expertise with his family background to write a page turning thriller, at the same time both wryly comic and memorable.

Fletcher knows his facts but, ever the journalist, sometimes loves them too much, overburdening us at times with unnecessary back-story. Pick writes with a greater delicacy of touch which means that the facts of Far to Go fall more gradually into place, keeping us guessing until the very last about the true identity of the different narrators and the path that has brought them to this place. The truth, when it comes, is shattering.

Fabrice Humbert

Serpent’s Tail 2011

The Origin of Violence (L’Origine de la Violence), the author’s third novel and the first to be translated into English, was swiftly extolled by the French press as a ‘great novel’ and a ‘revelation’. The novel won Le Prix Renaudot du Livre de Poche (the Prix Renaudot paperback award), a French literary award created in 1926 as a corollary of the Prix Goncourt. With the novel the author is also the first winner of the Prix Orange du Livre, the first literary award to involve web users throughout the award process. His latest novel, La Fortune de Sila (Sila’s Luck; Le Passage, 2010), has also been received with great acclaim, winning the Prix Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as Le Grand Prix RTL-Lire.

This compelling, if flawed, novel begins with a metaphysical reverie on the nature of evil, evoking the fall of Lucifer and images of Satan remembered from Dante. Evil as an abstracted personification takes on a real dimension when the narrator, a member of an old Norman family and teacher at the Parisian Franco-German lycée, takes his pupils on a trip to Buchenwald. The story begins here, when the narrator sees a photograph of the camp doctor with a prisoner —who is the living image of the narrator’s father. This haunting image propels the protagonist’s research into the identity of the prisoner, and through it the author inscribes him into the history of the Jews — since this anonymous prisoner takes flesh as his real grandfather, David Wagner.

The narrator’s problematic relationship with his father is played out in dialogue (as are all the relationships in the book) as flat and barren as his father’s life — the contours of whose circumscribed internal world are compared to his repetitive meanders of the streets of Paris. The narratives of David’s brother and a survivor of Buchenwald — David’s steadfast friend in the camp — lead the reader into the vividly evoked life of David Wagner. Through them, the resistant silence of that implacable fortress, which is the Fabre patriarchy is shattered, and the narrator becomes witness to the rise and fall of the morally flawed David; his amorous entanglements within the Fabre family — one driven by ambition, the other, passion; the consequent birth of a bastard, the narrator’s father; and the horrors of his imprisonment in Buchenwald. The narrator professes an obsession with violence — alluding to some nebulous, unexplained origin in childhood — an obsession which seems to find its fulfilment in the hell of Buchenwald, in the murder of his father’s father.

It is indeed in the account of the violence of Buchenwald that the author writes most powerfully and hauntingly. Throughout the work the narrator situates himself in relation to other authors, claiming that he can only respect accounts of lived experience in the camps, citing, for example, Primo Levi. The novel’s compelling account of the sheer madness of the camp, an arena in which the sadistic fantasies of the camp’s perpetrators (Martin Sommer, guard, Karl Otto Koch, Kommandant, and his wife Ilse) are brutally played out, and of the hierarchy of the prisoners, ranging from the Kapo to the living dead figure of the muselmann, is in every way worthy of Levi. Each perpetrator appears to embody a different facet of the face of violence; the sheer animal brutality of Stommer, who strangled, hung, poisoned hundreds of prisoners; the depravity and promiscuity of the flame-haired Ilse Koch, drunk with absolute power; most sinister of all, the insidious violence of the camp doctor (given a fictional role and name in the novel) who, in telling David the ‘Parable of the Jew’, implicitly assigns to him the role in the parable of the poisoned rat; a role which is fulfilled with David’s murder. Particularly graphic and disturbing is the account of David’s period as a Kalfacto in the Kochs’ house, where he exists as
a ghost, stripped of his identity and manhood, and ultimately, of hope.

Such convincing and poignant accounts as David’s are not — perhaps disappointingly — to be resumed in the novel. Following this profoundly felt excursion into the past, the story becomes somewhat bathetic, and the account of the narrator’s meeting and romance with a German teacher, the granddaughter of the morally tormented member of the Nazi party who was yet not a Nazi, lacks the resonance of the account of David’s affair. At this point the subject of the story becomes the narrator’s struggle to write his grandfather’s story itself; and the chapter about David’s experience in the camp appears to the reader to be a foretaste of this imagined story. The author fills the hiatus in the action of the novel with an intelligent and searching analysis of the social pre-conditions of Nazism, which is written more in the register of an historian rather than a novelist; consequently the reader experiences a jarring of styles, and feels almost as though the author is finding himself as a writer as much as the protagonist (both narrator and author are teachers turned writers).

The reader is drawn back into the overarching drama of the novel when the protagonist is called back to Paris to visit his dying ‘grandfather’ (husband to his father’s mother), heralding the dénouement of the novel. An element of doubt in the narrator’s relationship with both his father and grandfather lends a sinister edge, a sense of an unplumbed horror within the family…the horror, ultimately, of the Fabres’ betrayal of David. As both a Fabre and a Wagner, the protagonist carries both victim and perpetrator within him, and, in bringing the truth of David to light, enacts the wider authorial purpose of giving life to an anonymous face — and playing some part in expiating France’s heritage of guilt.

Fabrice Humbert is, like the narrator in The Origin of Violence, a young teacher at a Franco- German Lycée. He will, along with the novelist Agnès Desarthe (author of The Foundling), be talking to Michael Arditti during Jewish Book Week 2012 about his novel. Both authors have written novels about men who launch investigations into their own family histories, and through them find themselves confronted by the darkest atrocities of World War II. ( Sunday, 19 February 2012, 6.30 pm, King’s Place, St. Pancras Room)

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.

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

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.

Writing necessarily reflected the experience of those passing through the phase of “liminality”; that is standing on the threshold of disparate experiences, attractions and borders. This perception of borderlands was especially though certainly not exclusively within the spectrum of the Jewish population. The Jews were living in changing and uncertain times and subject to pressures often pulling in opposite directions. They inherited a tradition to which they might well have sensed a dubious loyalty. The adherence to the ancestral faith was often shaken by the exposure to new sources of truth testing and to a welter of ideologies. They lived amongst the Czechs, often spoke their language and shared their concerns. But were they really authentic Czechs? Many on the outside cast doubt on this, even such a person as their great friend and advocate Thomas Masaryk (1850-1937), first president of the republic, and such uneasiness was also sometimes experienced by the Jews themselves. And what about the German attraction? The primary language of communication of the Jews of the region might well have been German, and it was indeed most frequently their primary language, particularly amongst city dwellers. It was also the language of world culture, leading into, as it was hoped, a greater general acceptance of their intrusion on the part of that world. But did this bare fact, born of reality, mean then that they were genuinely German? The ambivalence relating to the responses to both questions, the Czech and the German, indicated a greater uncertainty. The truth was that they straddled three identities, Jewish, Czech and German, all embracing ethnicity, nationality and religion. In addition to which, these optional identities were  not only delimited themselves, but also in process, and thus changing their own nature quite significantly.

So the expressed culture that emerged reflected this exciting but unstable situation. Literature of a specifically characteristic tone was produced by what was, in terms of population proportion, a very small clique. These individuals, centred in Prague, became known as the Prague Circle (der Prager Kreis), primarily recoginized as such and described by Max Brod (1884-1968). Brod is mainly thought of today as the promoter and biographer of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), but he was, in his own right, a leading light of the Prague intelligentsia, a prolific novelist, music critic and publicist. He was not only Kafka’s closest friend, but he also became his executor and promoter par excellence, without whom Kafka might not have been widely published, let alone known as one of the greatest and most distinctive narrative writers of the era. Brod was also the primary historian of the Prague Circle, which soubriquet he created, arguing that the group as he saw it could not be regarded as a “school” in any coherent sense.

Indeed there were so many strands and tendencies amongst these writers, ideologically and technically, that this in effect did not constitute a school. Not only were the sympathies divided as between Left and Right, between Czechism, Germanism, Zionism and Internationalism, but these all also morphed with the changing times and situation.  The Jews of Bohemia were indeed positioned on the border. That border was composed of an inherited but weakening Jewish background and allegiance, a location within a growing and increasingly militant nationalism springing up within the indigenous population. But  there was also an impinging German presence. Simultaneously there began to emerge too as a third option an insistence that the Jews also should plant a stake in a recognition of their own ethnicity and a forging of a Zionism of a special brand.  As for the outside world which the writer inhabited, the situation was not only dynamic and fluid, but also not so slowly but surely moving in the direction of catastrophe.

How some of these various tendencies were reflected can be seen, for example, in the contrast between the work of Max Brod himself and that of Franz Werfel (1890-1945), the older man originally cherishing and nurturing the younger. Brod moved from a position of idealised assimilationism towards a single minded Zionism, whereas Werfel, one of the most celebrated Expressionist poets in the world, shifted from his commitment to world peace and a kind of pacifistic Communism,, towards a tender but enormous sympathy for Catholic Christianity. He also developed a career as a highly successful novelist, dramatist and Holywood  script writer, whilst fleeing the threat of Nazi persecution. Kafka himself, whilst dabbling in efforts to familiarize himself with Yiddish and also to learn Hebrew, clearly felt himself alienated from practically everything, both from his Czech environment and from his bourgeois Jewish background. He was desperate to be able  to commit himself to one of the possibilities extended, but he felt unable so to do. Such was the case too in regard to his inability to get married, despite his engagements and loves. He sought a meaningful anchor in life, but he also eschewed all labels and loyalties. As he saw it, he could not even know himself and remain whole within that entity, let alone to belong to publicly declared movements and to associate himself with some generalised ideological tendency. He was locked into a position of someone trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to know himself. Because of that failure he could not achieve marriage (vivre dans le vrai, as his hero Flaubert named it), and, as we observe, he could not either bring any of his long narratives to completion (his three novels are all uncompleted). This seems to parallel his understanding of the Messiah, who may indeed “come”, but only when it is too late.

Bohemia was not usually the final destination of these writers. Many were those who migrated, just as there were others, such as Martin Buber (from Poland) and Joseph Roth (from Galicia), who moved to Prague for brief snatches. The local authors, like the international ones, wrote primarily in German, although thy often knew Czech well. But German was no longer the undisputed master of the roost in Czechoslovakia, as the country was moving from a situation of imperial province to independent State. It was not only the immediate environment that was being transformed though, but the entire world. And this applied too to the personal world of the writer and to its expression in letters.

So many of our writers’ activities were disrupted, shifted and disturbed by the turbulence of events, as well as by attractions of ideology. Leo Perutz (1884-1957) left Prague and  served as an officer in the great war, and was wounded. Then he emigrated to Haifa (Palestine/Israel) and functioned as a successful novelist in the German tongue. But Prague remained the backdrop of his magical settings. This was the case too of the Vienna born Gustav Meyrink (1868-1932), who moved to Prague in his youth, and became the author of the Golem legend in fiction. The blind author, Oskar Baum (1883-1941), regarded by Brod as a founder member of the Prague Circle, wrote two collections of stories set in Prague. Paul Lappin (1878-1945) was a translator from Czech, but he wrote creatively mainly in German and was totally possessed by the presence of Prague. The great modernist poet, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was Prague born, and is seen by Brod as being on the fringed of the circle. Although he had departed the city early in life, he still regarded it as lodged deep in his heart. Many and various are the connections and associations of these authors, so disparate, but still drinking from this same well.

Where now do we locate this group? Perhaps, in our recognition of its differentiated nature, we should indeed not categorize it as a group at all, but rather as a historical phase and as a segment of cultural history. How was it that these writers, so meagre in number, managed to contribute so hugely to the cultural life of Europe? Here was the borderland position crying out for a voice in the contemporary world. This voice was, of necessity, the possession of all, but it also belonged to nothing totally. This stance constitutes its quintessential  character, and that is what it has transmitted to our own world. It appears to be so distant, as further radical transformations have taken place, and yet it is still close at hand. It both belongs to a vanished time and place, and yet is still present in so many guises.

Leon Yudkin is the author of The Prague Circle and Czech Jewry. Copies are available from the author, by contacting Yudk4@aol.com

Written soon after the Soviet Army liberated eastern Ukraine from German occupation in mid-1943, the original manuscript of Vasily Grossman’s essay ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ was thought to have been lost after the Second World War. It first appeared in 1990 in the short-lived journal Vek, and is translated here into English for the first time. ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ is a powerful and historically significant essay: one of the earliest public statements about the mass murder of Jews in 1941 and 1942 during the Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine, it is also one of the first attempts in any language to systematically explain the ideological and material motives behind the genocide that Grossman calls the ‘greatest crime ever committed in history.’ ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ was initially rejected for publication in 1943 by the military newspaper Red Star (Krasnaia zvezda), where Grossman had earned a huge following from his reports of the Soviet Army’s harrowing defense and stunning victory at Stalingrad. The essay was then translated into Yiddish and published in the weekly paper of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Unity (Einikayt). It was published in two abridged sections and then discontinued. The Yiddish translation remained the only extant version of the essay after 1943, and was back-translated into Russian in 1985. In 1990, the original Russian manuscript (near three times the length of the back-translation) surfaced from Grossman’s estate and was published in Vek. The recovery of ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ in its original form allows us to trace the origins and development of Grossman’s historical, commemorative and literary writing about the ‘catastrophe’ (as the Shoah was known in Russian). Grossman expanded upon and modified many of the ideas in this essay in later writings, including ‘The Hell of Treblinka’ (used as documentary evidence of Nazi war crimes at the Nuremburg Trials in 1945), as well as his editorial work on the monumental anthology The Black Book, and his two greatest novels, For a Just Cause and Life and Fate. ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ also provides unique insight into Grossman’s initial reaction to the genocide as a Soviet Jew; in it he expresses both his pride in socialist principles and Soviet military power, and his desire to publicize and explain the exceptional nature of Jewish victimization at the hands of the Nazis, whose genocide had claimed the life of his own mother in the western Ukrainian city of his birth, Berdichev.

Polly Zavadivker

Ukraine Without Jews

When our forces enter the villages of Left-bank Ukraine under a volley of fire and the din of hand grenades, domestic geese rise up into the air. Flapping their enormous white wings, they circle above peasant huts, above lakes covered in water lilies, above fields and gardens.

There is something worrisome and strange in the heavy, arduous flight, and the sharp, alarming and sorrowful cries of these domestic birds. It is as if they are calling the soldiers of the Red Army to witness heartbreaking and frightening images of life, as if they are rejoicing at the arrival of our forces, simultaneously weeping with joy and lamenting, screaming of great losses, and of the tears and blood that have aged and salted the soil of Ukraine.

There is a long list of Ukrainian towns and villages where I found myself while working as a special correspondent for the paper Red Star. I was in Satrobel’sk, Svatov, Muntsisk, Tsapuika, Voroshilovgrad, Krasnodon, Ostro, Iasotin, Borispol, Baturin…I was in hundreds of villages, farms, settlements, and fishing outposts on the shores of the Desna and Dnieper, in steppe farms encircled by pastures, in solitary little tar houses existing in a constant shadow of huge pine forests, and in beautiful hamlets whose thatched roofs are hidden beneath canopies of fruit trees.

If one was to gather into a single place all of the stories and images that I witnessed during those days and months in Ukraine, it would amount to a horrifying book about colossal injustice: forced labor and secret beatings, children deported to Germany, burnt houses and looted warehouses, evictions onto squares and streets, pits where those suspected of having sympathy for or connections with partisans were shot, humiliations and mockery, vulgar cursing and bribes, drunken and erratic behavior, and the bestial depravity of reckless, criminal people in whose hands rested the fate, life, integrity and property of many millions of Ukrainian people for two long years. There is no home in a single Ukrainian town or village where you will not hear bitter and evil words about the Germans, no home where tears have not flowed during these past two years; no home where people do not curse German fascism; no home without an orphan or widow. These tears and curses flow like streams to an immense river of collective grief and fury; day and night, its troubles and pain roar beneath a Ukrainian sky that has been darkened by the smoke of raging fires.

There are also villages in Ukraine where one doesn’t hear any crying or see tear-filled eyes, villages that are ruled by silence and peace. I visited a village like this on two occasions—the first time on 26 September, and again on 17 October in 1943. This village, Kozary, lies on the ancient Kievan highway between Nezhiny and Kozelets.  I visited Kozary once during the day, and another time on a heavy autumn night. On both occasions silence and peace ruled over Kozary—the peace and silence of death.  The Germans burnt seven hundred and fifty homes here before Easter, and seven hundred and fifty families were burnt alive in these homes. No one, not a single child or old woman emerged from the flames. In this manner the Germans punished a village for having sheltered partisans.  Tall, dusty weeds had sprouted from the ashes. Wells were filled with sand and gardens were covered in wild grass.  A withered flower could be glimpsed among the weeds.  There is no one in Kozary with whom one can mourn, no one to talk to, no one to cry to. Silence and peace hang over dead bodies buried in homes that have been reduced to rubble and covered with weeds. This silence is more horrifying than tears and curses; it is a silence more terrifying than moans and piercing lamentation.

And it occurred to me that just as Kozary is silent, so too are the Jews in Ukraine silent. In Ukraine there are no Jews. Nowhere—not in Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, not in Iagotin. You will not see the black, tear-filled eyes of a little girl, you will not hear the sorrowful drawling voice of an old woman, you will not glimpse the swarthy face of a hungry child in a single city or a single one of hundreds of thousands of shtetls.

Stillness. Silence. A people has been murdered.  Murdered are elderly artisans, well-known masters of trades: tailors, hatmakers, shoemakers, tinsmiths, jewelers, housepainters, furriers, bookbinders; murdered are workers: porters, mechanics, electricians, carpenters, furnace workers, locksmiths; murdered are wagon drivers, tractor drivers, chauffeurs, cabinet makers; murdered are millers, bakers, pastry chefs, cooks; murdered are doctors, therapists, dentists, surgeons, gynecologists; murdered are experts in bacteriology and biochemistry, directors of university clinics, teachers of history, algebra, trigonometry; murdered are lecturers, department assistants, candidates and doctors of science; murdered are engineers, metallurgists, bridge builders, architects, ship builders; murdered are pavers, agronomists, field-crop growers, land surveyors; murdered are accountants, bookkeepers, store merchants, suppliers, managers, secretaries, night guards; murdered are teachers, dressmakers; murdered are grandmothers who could mend stockings and bake delicious bread, who could cook chicken soup and make strudel with walnuts and apples; and murdered are grandmothers who didn’t know how to do anything except love their children and grandchildren; murdered are women who were faithful to their husbands, and murdered are frivolous women; murdered are beautiful young women, serious students and happy schoolgirls; murdered are girls who were unattractive and foolish; murdered are hunchbacks; murdered are singers; murdered are blind people; murdered are deaf and mute people; murdered are violinists and pianists; murdered are threeyear-old and two-year-old children; murdered are eightyyear-old elders who had cataracts in their dimmed eyes, cold transparent fingers and quiet, rustling voices like parchment; murdered are crying newborns who were greedily sucking at their mothers’ breasts until their final moments. All are murdered, many hundreds of thousands, millions of people.

This is not the death of individuals at war who had weapons in their hands and had left behind their home, family, fields, songs, books, customs and folktales. This is the murder of a people, the murder of homes, entire families, books, faith, the murder of the tree of life; this is the death of roots, and not branches or leaves; it is the murder of a people’s body and soul, the murder of life that toiled for generations to create thousands of intelligent, talented artisans and intellectuals. This is the murder of a people’s morals, customs and anecdotes passed from fathers to sons; this is the murder of memories, sad songs, and epic tales of good and bad times; it is the destruction of family homes and of burial grounds. This is the death of a people who had lived beside Ukrainian people for centuries, laboring, sinning, performing acts of kindness, and dying alongside them on one and the same earth.

There are descriptions of Jews in the works of all of our great writers who have depicted life in Ukraine—Gogol, Chekhov, Korolenko, and Gorky. How could it be otherwise? Who among us born and raised in Ukraine did not from their earliest years absorb a living portrait of Jewish people in the cities, shtetls and villages of Ukraine?  Remember Sabbath days when elders walked with their prayer shawls beneath poplar trees on quiet spring nights; remember old men standing on corners carrying on sly and clever conversations among themselves; remember self-important shtetl shoemakers, sitting on rickety stools in front of the rickety doors of their shops; remember naive, humorous signs hanging above the locksmith, hat-maker and tailor shops; remember bearded wagon drivers showered in bags of wheat flour tied up in their aprons; remember old ladies in dresses offering you candies and apples; curly-haired, black-eyed children running in the dusty streets, their curls and eyes sparkling next to the pale hair and eyes of their Ukrainian counterparts and mingling like flowers generously scattered upon the rich, soft Ukrainian soil. Our grandfathers lived here; our mothers, and the mothers of our sons were born here.  So much sweat and so many tears have been shed here that no one could think to call the Jew a stranger, or say that he is alien to this land.

I travelled and walked this land from the northern Donets to the Dnieper, from Voroshilovgrad in the Donbass to Chernigov on the Desna; I have walked along the Dnieper and looked out at Kiev. And during all this time, I met one single Jew. This was Lieutenant Shloyme Shmilevich Kipershtein. He fell into German entrapment in September of 1941 near the city Iagotin. His wife Vasilina Grigorievna Sokur, a Christian, had tried to pass him off as a Moldavian. The Gestapo brought her in for interrogation several times and came to her home two different times suspecting that her husband was a Jew, but she insisted that her husband’s name was Stepan, and his family name Novak. I met him, spoke with him, spent an entire evening listening to his stories, and all of us—Kipershtein, his wife, his fellow Christian neighbors, and I marveled at the fact that Kipershtein is alive and has not been killed. I did not meet any other Jews in Ukraine. Acquaintances told me that they had seen one Jew in Kharkov and one in Kursk; the writer Ilya Ehrenburg told me that he had met a Jewish female partisan somewhere in southern Ukraine. But that is all.

Where is the Jewish people? Who will ask the twentieth century’s Cain that dreadful question: where are the Jewish people who once lived in Ukraine? Where are hundreds of thousands of elderly people and children? Where are millions of people who three years ago toiled and lived on this earth in peaceful friendship with Ukrainians?

The people have been murdered, trampled in the earth.  It is neither meaningful nor possible to list the names of every victim, for all of them are equally innocent and must be counted, regardless of whether they were famous and world-renown scholars, or whether they were unknown, barely literate women living in quiet shtetls far from any railroads. Why name some of the victims but remain silent about others? But it is impossible to list an entire people by name. There is no sense in, and no possibility of naming all the places where Jews were murdered in great numbers during the fall of 1941 and summer of 1942. These executions took place in every large and small city and in every shtetl. The only thing that must be said is that if there were 100 Jews living in a small town, then 100 Jews were slaughtered, nowhere a single person less. If 55,000 Jews lived in a city, then in that city 55,000 Jews were killed, and never a single person less. These massacres, we must understand, were carried out according to finely detailed lists, lists that did not overlook hundred-year old elders or newborn babies. These lists ensured the death of every last Jew in Ukraine.

I travelled and walked this land from the northern Donets to the Dnieper, from Voroshilovgrad in the Donbass to Chernigov on the Desna; I have walked along the Dnieper and looked out at Kiev. And during all this time, I met one single Jew.

We must remember that mass murder was carried out uniformly, according to strict and elaborate instructions in which provisions were made for how to murder a person who was too senile to walk, and one who hadn’t yet left his mother’s arms or taken his first steps. It was announced in hundreds of towns that Jews would be sent to ghettos and were required to gather fifteen kilograms of baggage; and in hundreds of towns, they were then led to the outskirts and murdered with the latest automatic weapons.  Even now, even a year or two after the event, people who happened to see these executions still weep and lose their ability to speak upon recounting the images of horror and madness to which they became witnesses.

It is impossible to recount the names of all the colonels, generals, majors, captains, and lieutenants in the German army who assisted the Gestapo by organizing the execution of a people. It is impossible to recount the names of all the soldiers, lance-corporals, senior lancecorporals, non-commissioned officers, security guards and policemen who carried out this murder.

How is this murder different from the hundreds and thousands of people that the Germans executed elsewhere in fascist-occupied Europe? There is a difference, and it lies in the fact that the fascists execute French, Dutch, Serbian, Ukrainian, Russian and Czech people for violating fascist rules and laws—hiding a switchblade or an old revolver, accidentally uttering an angry word, a young man refusing to abandon his elderly parents for a German labor camp, or offering a sip of water to a partisan. But the Germans execute the Jews only because of the fact that they are Jews. In their view, Jews have no right to be alive. To be a Jew is the greatest transgression, a crime that can be punished only by death. That is why all the Jews in Ukraine were murdered, and that is why they were killed in many countries in Europe. The majority of those killed were old women, the elderly, sick people and children. The reason for this is that able-bodied men, women and youth were able to retreat along with the Red Army and are now either fighting in its ranks or working on its behalf. Those who stayed behind in Ukraine did not have the strength to leave. It was these people—old people, sick people and children—whom the Germans killed in cold blood, annihilating all of them to a man.

As long as humanity has existed on earth, there has never been a murder of innocent and defenseless people as organized, massive, and as cruel as this one. This is the greatest crime ever committed in history, and history has known many crimes; it is written with blood. This is a matter of the murder of an entire people, the slaughter of millions of defenseless children, women and elders.  The Jews of Ukraine are no more.

Human consciousness is built in such an unfortunate, though perhaps also fortunate way that when people read or hear about a tragedy that has claimed millions of peoples’ lives, they are simply incapable of understanding the horrifying profundity of what took place. This limitation is a fortunate attribute of human consciousness because it protects people from moral suffering and insanity. This limit of human knowledge is equally terrible because it enables people to be lenient, superficial and morally passive.  But in this era, it seems to me, the life of individuals and entire peoples has been devalued, and the value of personal freedom has been trampled under the boot of Germanfascist dogma—and it is precisely now, as never before, that demands for moral purity and righteousness must be raised to unattainable heights, both with respect to our individual lives and to the State. It is not only Europe, but in fact all of humanity that stands on the threshold of extinction.  This immense earth has been transformed into a wasteland, thousands of its great cities have been blown up and burned down. The world war has taken millions of people who like animals live in pits and trenches, and flung them backwards to prehistoric times. H.G. Wells’ most dismal fantasies about imminent global catastrophe seem like harmless folktales in comparison to present-day reality.

This seething, amoral force came from National-Socialist Germany.

It was born from a sense of German racial exclusivity, from the deep and heartfelt conviction held by contemporary Germans that they are the chosen people; that their happiness, tranquility and security are the only sacred things on earth. This is an ideology of exclusivity, of suspicion and indifference to the suffering of other nations, and of sentimental pathos for one’s own people.  This consciousness is the scourge of present day humanity, and it was aroused in Germany. It has led her down a path of bloody crimes, and it shall bring her to the precipice of cruel defeat.

Do Hitler and the German fascist leaders all truly believe that Jews are Germany’s foremost enemies, or that their annihilation is necessary for Germany’s happiness? Of course not. These people consciously produced this bloody propaganda.

In our times, the equality of all people constitutes the highest moral principle of humanity.  Racism is the exact opposite of this principle.  People will ask me, ‘are the Germans a nation of murderers and criminals, then?’

No! For we believe in the great principle of equality of the world’s peoples. We know that the German people have not only produced Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and Rozenberg; not just the Hohenzollern and Krupp dynasties; not only Stennes and Guderian, Ley and Ribbentrop, Horst Wessel and Nietzsche. This is the same people who produced Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Feurbach, Marx, Engels, and the great martyr Liebnekht. It produced the enlightened wisdom and pure soul of August Bebel, and has borne thousands of proletarian fighters, hundreds of humane and modest social and scholarly activists, and many kind women and sincere old workers.  When the war is over, will we tell the German people, ‘You are murderers: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’?  Will we avenge the murder of a people by killing another?

No. Democracy’s victory will not only be a victory of weapons. There will be a true victory when the dark force of racism is finally reduced to ashes. Germans will understand that the idea of racial exceptionalism is a criminal and false one, and that their happiness and peace are not the only sacred things in the world. This victor will endure because of the mighty power of weapons, which will force the Germans to always know that all people are equally entitled to life on earth. The raised sword is answered with the language of the sword. This is the sacred logic and morality of contemporary war.  But today we are still at war, and Hitler’s obedient murderous gang, fascist Germany, is spilling innocent blood.

I had the chance to talk to dozens of German POWs.  Our conversations took place amidst the smoky ruins of devastated cities and villages. We talked about mass murder, about executions of Ukrainian and Russian populations, and about the complete destruction of the Jewish people, and I did not once detect in them a sense of humiliation, despair, or desire to disavow the disgraceful crimes associated with the name of Germany. With extraordinary naivet., all of them espoused the view that ‘crimes against humanity’ are not really crimes because their purpose is to benefit Germany. These soldiers could explain every act in terms of its instrumental value, and many of them said that the execution of the Jewish people had in fact turned out to be useless, and that mass murder and the burning of hundreds and thousands of villages had not brought Germany the advantages that had been expected from these measures. It is from this point of view that they judged the massive crimes committed by Germany.

Why did National-Socialist Germany become the executioner of the Jewish people? I want to raise this particular question not only because I myself am a Jew, and not only because those closest to me were victims of fascist bloodshed.

The treatment of Jews expressed contemporary fascist German ideology and tactics in their crudest and most complete and final form. The Germans did not commit such bestial, inhumane violence, lacking all traces of humanity, against any other people on earth. For fascism, hatred for the Jews became paramount; it was the fuel for its fire. Anti-Semitism became the universal weapon of fascism.

The significance of anti-Semitism lies in the fact that a war against Jewry is a formula suited to the war that Germany wanted to wage against the world. Given present circumstances, Jews do not have their own state, and are scattered across all parts of the world. One finds Jews among American capitalists, English social activists, Russian communists, and French anarcho-syndicalists.  This is very convenient for a state and people that have raised the black flag of war against all states and all peoples of the world. By selecting the Jews as victims of its demagogy, National-Socialism freed its hand against every nation and social class. It was able to declare war both on Marxism and the new structure of Russian society, and on plutocratic England, America and France; in a word, it was able to declare war against the world. This choice of victims constituted the first decision made by the criminal, jingoist National-Socialists.

Anti-Semitism has always been the banner, weapon and wool used by reactionaries to blindfold the masses.  It has always been an opiate in dark times when ruling minorities sought to deceive the masses, and deflect the righteous anger of the oppressed. National-Socialism came to power in Germany during a period when reaction had gripped every stratum and class within German society.  Reactionary politics won out in Germany after its defeat in the imperialist war of 1914. Blinded by national egoism, every strata of German society had invested different hopes in an eventual victory. But the war failed to resolve the conflicts of the modern capitalist world, and the Treaty of Versailles proved equally unable to resolve them. The solution to these conflicts lies in the great and sacred principles of brotherhood and equality of all peoples; it lies in the eradication of imperialistic conflict between states, the elimination of class structure in society, and in the creation of a collective means of production and a just distribution of goods.

But to its own misfortune, humanity did not have the strength to complete this task.

At that point, National-Socialism led onto the executioner’s block a universal and eternal, tried and true, defenseless and therefore desirable enemy: the Jew. With no law and no army to defend him, the Jew is an optimal target for the wrath of a weak underdog.

‘You fear proletarian revolution,’ the Nazis told Germany’s capitalists, ‘you fear communism, which is a hundred times more frightening to you than the Versailles Treaty. We too fear the proletarian revolution. Let us unite against the Jews. They are, after all, the eternal origin oftrouble and bloody rebellion; it is they who as orators and authors of revolutionary books inflame and agitate the masses; they who created the idea of class struggle and proletarian revolution!’

To the toiling German masses the Nazis said, ‘You suffer the consequences of the Versailles Treaty; you are hungry and out of work. The heavy burden of reparations has fallen on your weary backs. But just look at whose hands turn the wheel—it is the hands of Jewish tycoons, Jewish bankers, kings without crowns in America, France and England. Your enemies are our enemies; come, and let us fight together.’

Addressing the German intelligentsia, the Nazis said ‘You are humiliated, your ideals have been shattered. No one needs your talents or knowledge. You, salt of the earth, are doomed to become waiters and taxi drivers. Don’t you see the cold and merciless eyes of world Jewry gazing at you like a fog encircling Germany? Let us fight on behalf of our national honor and trampled earth, let us together extinguish the decaying world of Jewry.’

Having reached this dead end, Germany blindly followed National-Socialism. It was pushed onto this path by defeat and reaction. But not by these things alone, no.  Germany had been prepared for this path over the centuries by a culture of national and political egoism. Germany had never lost faith in the strength of its clenched fist to knock the world flat. It had always continued to believe in the sanctity of righteous war, and regarded the strategic plans of its military as its highest social ethic. And so, ten years ago Germany finally became wedded to National-Socialism. The explosive interaction of historical factors and a reactionary atmosphere became the second reason why National-Socialism felt compelled to choose the Jewish people as victims of its criminal demagogy.

And the final reason: fascism is profoundly opposed to the idea of equality among nations, of the brotherhood and unity of all peoples of the world. The foundational principle of fascism, after all, is a belief in the master German race.  Fascism therefore decided to construct a great ladder of forced labor of nations. It resolved to poison each nation against all others: to place the Dutch and Danes on the highest rungs of the ladder of punishment in order to show them that they are better off than the Norwegians and French; to poison the French with an awareness of the petty privileges they have over the Czechs and Greeks; to place the Serbs further down, and appease them with the fact that Ukrainians and Belorussians stand below them on the bottom rungs. And finally, fascism resolved to frighten this whole entire colony of peoples, its ladder of oppression, with the horrible abyss of non-existence it had prepared for the Jewish people.

But for fascism it was not enough to scare the Ukrainians with the destruction of the Jewish people, or to placate their fear with the notion that they had at least been granted existence on the ladder of forced labor. Fascism hoped for more than this; it hoped to infect Ukrainians with hatred for the Jews and to deceive them by spreading the idea that Jews were to blame for all the poverty, misfortune and burdens that had devastated Ukraine.  The principle to divide and conquer, and to poison enslaved and doomed nations with hatred for one another was the third factor that compelled Adolf Hitler to embark on a bloody provocation, and to lead millions of defenseless women, elderly people and children to the executioner’s block.

Do Hitler and the German fascist leaders all truly believe that Jews are Germany’s foremost enemies, or that their annihilation is necessary for Germany’s happiness?  Of course not. These people consciously produced this bloody propaganda. They are unprincipled by the very fact of their existence, and people without principles do not possess and are not capable of possessing any beliefs.  Their actions are guided solely by temporary circumstances and pragmatism. While I may disagree with President Roosevelt on several issues, I am absolutely certain that regardless of how much circumstances might change, Roosevelt’s principles would remain the same.  There is infinitely greater integrity, honesty and room for partnership in this persistence of values (even regarding matters where there are great differences of opinion), than there is in the conformism, deceit, and sudden shifts of sham ideology that constitutes the extremes of German National-Socialism.

At this point I wish to express some ideas about the inner essence of anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism exists in every country in the world and has existed throughout human history. It can be found even in contemporary democratic states. Its character changes in different times and places, of course.  Anti-Semitism in England and anti-Semitism in tsarist Russia are not the same thing. Its appearance depends on reactionary forces, such as deceitful attempts of ruling powers to explain and ameliorate social and ideological discontent. Anti-Semitism is a paradigmatic conflict with no solution. The period of post-revolutionary reaction in Russia between 1905 and 1911 has become known for bloody Jewish pogroms and charges of ritual murder. But the great Russian Revolution was a period of history that did not know anti-Semitism. Here I am speaking of state anti-Semitism, that is, of the willful incitement of anti-Semitism by a government apparatus.

In addition to state anti-Semitism, there is also so-called ‘ideological’ anti-Semitism. Ideological anti-Semitism is a phenomenon born of a physiological need to explain human and global problems by examining them in a looking glass rather a mirror. One finds ideological anti-Semites primarily among educated people. When the great Dostoevsky blamed the Jews for impoverishing the masses in Russia’s borderlands, he merely substituted the invisible and mysterious historical process that had produced bourgeois, feudal Russian society with the idea that Jewish commercial circles had supposedly invaded Russia.  Mid-nineteenth century Russia experienced an intense growth in capitalist relations. Petty buyers and sellers, small factory owners, and contractors began to appear everywhere, destroying the old means of production to benefit themselves, and ruining idyllic relations between feudal lords and their serfs.

Anti-Semitism became the universal weapon of fascism….A war against Jewry is a formula suited to the war that Germany wanted to wage against the world.

Dostoevsky saw the new relations, but he did not, or perhaps could not see the new qualities and types of Russian people—the plundering buyers, merciless leasers, and greedy factory owners—who accompanied them. He did not sense that Russian people had changed at all, and this meant that some other people who were not Russians had introduced the new qualities into life. These were the Jews: people who had no love for the system of Russian patriarchy, and no connection to the soil; people who were driven only by a hunger for profit, and who regarded the toiling masses with cold indifference. Dostoevsky saw these features in the Jewish merchant and developed a profound hatred for him. But the one thing he failed to understand was that by looking at the Jewish trader, Jewish leaser, and Jewish middle-man, he was only gazing at a mirror that showed him a magnified image of the new Russian bourgeoisie, frantically evolving in hundreds and thousands of Russian villages, provincial cities, capitals and far-flung hamlets.

This phenomenon has repeated itself throughout all of Jewish history. The medieval Spanish inquisition that burned Jews at the stake did not grasp the fact that it held up the Jews as a mirror of its own rigid intolerance, orthodoxy and backwards prejudice; that by burning Jews, it was contending with flaws that had grown up inside its own heart. When Russian reactionary thinkers perceived the Jews as the source of a revolutionary epidemic, they did not and perhaps could not know that they were seeing a reflection of a Russia that was unconsciously birthing a revolution in thousands of its factories, plants and mines, and in its universities and army barracks. Ideological anti-Semitism cannot and does not want to understand this.  One can put it this way: ‘Tell me what you blame on the Jews, and I will tell you what you are guilty of yourself.’

What did the Nazis blame on the Jews?  They accused them of the seven deadly sins. The paradoxical, remarkable thing is that the portrait that the Nazis painted of Jews—their supposedly fanatical racism, thirst for global power, hunger to enslave and recklessly rule over humankind—was in fact a self-portrait. By endowing Jews with the traits, flaws and criminal intentions that were raging in their very own hearts, National-Socialism fatefully repeated what previous anti-Semites had done throughout the ages.

The Germans are now being expelled from Ukraine.  Every day the glorious, weary earth is being liberated, as if a flood of muddy, filthy German hatred is receding and in its wake, bread is once again beginning to rise, hunched black trees, bushes and forests are straightening themselves out, and the sun and wind are drying out soil that is soaked with blood and tears. People are speaking in normal voices again and looking at the world with open eyes. Millions of people have been freed from slavery.

Ukraine was one of the fascists’ most important prizes. Its discussions about Ukraine had begun as early as 1933. And now, it is in the process of losing—it has already lost—Ukraine. Fascism failed to understand (how could it possibly understand?) the strength of our people’s resistance, their great spirit and undying sense of human worth. Fascism did not understand the power of the Soviet system! A system that endured trials of adversity in the Revolution, Civil War and period of great construction.  Fascism misunderstood and underestimated the friendship of nations among the peoples of the Soviet Union, and crudely dismissed the Union as a ‘geographic concept.’ Fascism was incapable of fathoming that the Soviet Union is the noble, triumphant and courageous soul of liberated humanity.

Fascism did not gauge the strength of our Red Army; its powerful reserves, courage, technical power. It failed to see that this army is immortal, that its generals, soldiers, tanks, guns and planes are the creations of an immortal people. With its boorish, small and primitive mind fascism attempted to change the march of history. German fascism understood nothing and was mistaken in everything.

By endowing Jews with the traits, flaws and criminal intentions that were raging in their very own hearts, National-Socialism fatefully repeated what previous anti-Semites had done throughout the ages.

The Germans failed to deceive Ukraine because its people cannot be deceived. The senseless and horrifying murder of elders, women and children transformed Ukraine into a nightmare. In Ukrainian towns and villages, people speak with profound empathy for the victims, and with repulsive hatred for the butchers who committed a mass murder of Jews in the fall of 1941 and summer of 1942.

Khristia Chuniak, a forty year old peasant from the village Krasilovka, in the Brovary district of Kiev oblast, described to me how the Germans led a Jewish doctor named Feldman to be executed in Brovary. This Feldman was an old bachelor who had adopted two Christian boys and was loved by everyone. A group of weeping and lamenting peasants went to appeal to the German commanding officer so that he would spare Feldman’s life.  The women’s tears moved the commander, and he agreed.  This was in the fall of 1941. Feldman continued to live and work as a doctor in Brovary, and he was executed in the spring of 1943. Khristia Chuniak described how the old man had to dig his own grave; apparently he had to die alone, for by the spring of 1943 there were no longer any living Jews. As she came to the end of the story, she sobbed and openly wept. The sorrow-filled words of this simple story expressed with astonishing clarity Ukraine’s relationship to its murdered Jewry.

No one believed the fascist propaganda that Jews were preparing to enslave Ukraine and take over the world.  Ukrainians were familiar with Jews after generations of working, growing old and dying beside them on the same earth, and working people have always been free and estranged from anti-Semitism in all of its forms. Towns with large Jewish populations like Berdichev had never even known anti-Semitism. Ukrainians, Russians, Poles and Jews always lived and worked together in friendship in these towns.

And so a great people, simple and wise, figured out the eternal tragedy of the Jewish people, and understood something that many educated reactionaries could not: they understood the inner essence of anti-Semitism. The people knew that the Germans were themselves guilty of whatever crimes they had blamed on the Jews, that the concepts of world domination, bloody racism, suspicion, and hatred had been imported by the fascists themselves.  The people knew who had tormented, humiliated and robbed them; they understood why the Germans shouted day and night about the criminal Juden. Once they understood this, they bowed their heads in sympathy and grief for the executed Jews, and with silent contempt, they clenched their teeth and glared at the Nazis.

The people understood the inner essence of fascist anti-Semitism, and with their simple and wise vision, they saw through a mirror of lies and looked deep into the eyes of the butchers of modern humanity. This is how they defeated the goal of National-Socialism, a goal that led Germany to put an entire people on the executioner’s block, and commit a crime unprecedented in all of human history.

In gullies and deep ravines, in anti-tank ditches of sand and clay, under heavy black soil, and in swamps and pits, there lie hastily flung bodies of professors and workers, doctors and students, old people and children.

No sound of tears or moaning; no sight of faces drawn from suffering. Jews are silent with the dreadful silence of the village Kozary on the old highway to Kiev.  The wind carries sand onto enormous common graves.  Grass has grown on the fields of death. Tall poplar trees flutter above the earth, like dark flags folded in a sign of mourning.

Silence and peace.

Oh, if the murdered people could be revived for an instant, if the ground above Babi Iar in Kiev or Ostraia Mogila in Voroshilovgrad could be lifted, if a penetrating cry came forth from hundreds and thousands of lips covered in soil, then the Universe would shudder.

The Yiddish version ‘Ukraina on yidn’ appeared in Einikayt on 25 November 1943 and 2 December 1943; for the Russian back-translation from the Yiddish, see ‘Ukraina bez evreev,’ trans. Rokhl Baumvol’, in Vasilii Grossman, Na evreiski temi, ed. Shimon Markish ( Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliya, 1985) vol.2:333-340. The complete Russian version of ‘Ukraina bez evreev’ on which the present translation is based may be found in VEK: Vestnik Evreiskoi Kultury, no. 4 (Riga, 1990): 1-8

Published with the kind permission of the Grossman Estate, courtesy of Andrew Nurnberg Associates Ltd

Palgrave Macmillan. 2011

Jeremy Ben-Ami is a first rate political operator. In four short years he has made J Street a $5 million organisation and successfully built a Washington power base in opposition to the AIPAC juggernaut and the rest of the so called ‘pro-Israel’ lobby. With its mantra of ‘Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace’, J Street funds electoral battles, lobbies Congress and attempts to reframe the terms of debate. It has also spawned international imitators such as the predominantly French JCall and the recent UK start-up Yachad. Unfortunately Ben Ami’s skills as a theorist do not match his organisational success. A New Voice for Israel (subtitled ‘Fighting for the Survival of the Jewish Nation’) proves insufficient to jump-start a renewed peacemaking effort; his preference for platitudes over difficult questions leaves the book an exercise in nostalgia rather than an effective call to arms.

The book opens well, with Ben Ami using his family narrative to explain his position today, beginning with his grandparents’ status as founder residents of Tel Aviv. He goes on to focus on his father, Yitzhak Ben-Ami, a socialist idealist in the Ahad Ha’am mould who became a Jabotinskyite revisionist following the Arab riots of 1929. After rising up the ranks of the Irgun he devoted himself in the late 1930s to bringing in Jewish immigrants to Palestine, taking him first to Vienna and then to New York. In doing so he was opposed both by the British and the Zionist establishment. The latter wanted to prioritise the legal route, operating under the British quota, despite being set at disastrously low levels. In the USA, the American Jewish establishment, comprised of anti—Zionists and socialist Zionists, fiercely opposed the work of the revisionists through every available means, with the result that far less European Jews were saved than otherwise would have been possible. Ben Ami uses his father’s life story to powerful effect — just as the American Jewish leadership was wrong then, it is wrong now. Now, as then, the appropriate way to deal with critical voices is “not to reflexively shut them down but to engage them on the merits and see what value there may be in what they are trying to say.”

Ben Ami goes on to tell a story of generational change, of the differing views of Israel held by those, like his parents, who lived through the foundation of the state, and those like him who grew up after the 1967 war. His full awakening came during an extended stay in Israel in the 1990s, when he discovered that “yes, the Palestinians are a people, and yes they do believe that my people came and threw them out of the homes and took their country away from them”. From this vantage point he views witha mix of understanding and alarm the children of the 1980s for whom “the defining images of Israel are of intifada and occupation”, alongside many who see Israel as increasingly irrelevant to their Jewish identity. While Ben Ami is disappointed by those that would prefer not to think about Israel, he is more concerned by the other outgrowth of this constituency, the pro- Palestinian and BDS movements, dominated by young Jews. Ben Ami criticises attempts to silence these younger groups, and is keen to distinguish between those who he sees as beyond the pale and those that have a legitimate point of view. But frequently he comes across as trying to stem a tidal wave, advocating piecemeal remedies when radical surgery is required. He recognises the radical changes in Jewish life, with younger Jews seeking expressions of Jewishness outside the mainstream, but laments their lack of connection to the ‘vibrant network of young activists’ in Israel. This wish for a greater sense of Jewish ‘peoplehood’ is widespread amongst Jewish leaders, but it seems rather futile, given the anti-parochial universalist stance of many young diaspora Jews, who see Israel as one country among many that do not yet live up to their view of justice.

At the heart of Ben Ami’s case is a critique of contemporary American Jewish leadership (one that could easily be applied throughout the Diaspora), describing it as out of touch, unrepresentative and committed to stymieing debate around Israel and Jewish identity. This is justified, but entirely unoriginal. Such a critique might have had an impact 10 years ago, but in the wake of a decade of criticism, most notably from John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, it comes across as merely stating the obvious. The question of timing is pertinent — this is a book rooted in the early 1990s (the author was a Clinton aide) and Ben Ami is trapped in a Clintonian paradigm. Like many who came to prominence in that era, he focuses on the technocratic, believing that the ‘Clinton Parameters’ that were utilised at Camp David and Taba negotiations are sufficient to solve the conflict. In keeping with this he is resistant to making any deeper analysis; into nationalism, into inequalities of power or into the events of 1948, and he is at his least comfortable when dealing with the events of the last decade, be they the second intifada, the Wall, or the blockade of Gaza.

The book is at its weakest when it moves from diagnosis of the problem to potential solutions. Naturally, Ben Ami, like all centrist politicians, believes in the two state solution. So, however, does Benjamin Netanyahu (apparently), and he has managed to combine this professed belief with continuing settlement expansion and ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. Ben Ami has nothing to say about people (like the supposedly saintly Shimon Peres) who wax lyrical about the two state solution while making no criticism of checkpoints, house demolitions or collective punishment. Predictably, Ben Ami rules any kind of one state solution out of court without any discussion, and, more dangerously, declares any return of Palestinian refugees impossible, claiming that those who believe in it “oppose the state of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people”. An agreement with only limited numbers of Palestinian refugees returning to Israel might indeed be possible, but such a crucial issue cannot be ruled out of court at the outset, and the attempt to do so reveals a view of the conflict in which Israelis have red lines that must be respected while Palestinians hold extremist views that need to be watered down. Ben Ami’s most damning failure is his response to the planned Palestinian declaration of independence. Rather than welcoming a diplomatic move that is obviously a manifestation of the two state solution, Ben Ami calls for the US to “pre-empt this with an active and ambitious diplomatic initiative to achieve a two state solution”. Essentially then, the US should veto the creation of a Palestinian state, in order to make possible the creation of a Palestinian state. The subtext is clear — Israelis must be the ones to take the initiative, Palestinians the passive recipients of whatever largesse the international community decides to throw their way.

Street’s timidity was most apparent in the debacle of 2009-10, in which Obama publicly demanded that Israel freeze all settlement construction beyond the Green Line. The Israeli government, despite agreeing a limited ten-month freeze, refused to accede to the President’s demand, creating a long standoff at the end of which Netanyahu proved victorious and Obama was humiliated. At this juncture Obama needed to utilise the key sticks of US foreign policy, threatening America’s arm sales to Israel, her loan guarantees and her diplomatic support at the UN. This would surely have been the moment J Street was designed for; it needed to be there to support Obama against the furious Israel lobby and to show that such pressure was not anti-Israel, but in her best long term interests. None of this happened, because the mainstream lobby was too strong and J-Street too weak, making it politically impossible for Washington to dictate terms to its long-term ally. Reviewing this period, Ben Ami describes the call for a settlement freeze as a tactical error on Obama’s part. The president should, instead, have put his political capital into defining the borders of a Palestinian state, making it clear ‘who can build where’. It is unclear why Ben-Ami thinks this would have made any difference; the issue is that Israel’s government demonstrably no longer believes in a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, preferring a much reduced territory on the West Bank that lies somewhere between glorified local government and a Bantustan. It wasn’t Obama’s rhetoric that was the problem; it was his inability to put real pressure on the recalcitrant government of Netanyahu and Lieberman and J Street’s unwillingness to support such muscular action.

With this we come full circle. Jeremy Ben Ami’s theoretical weakness underpins a failure of realpolitik. His inability to think beyond Clinton era soundbites and his naiveté in the face of the Israeli right stands in the way of J-Street’s potential to change the terms of the political debate. This has wider implications, especially for those like Yachad, who operate in J Street’s image. The task is surely to create a diasporic movement that will put massive pressure on Israel to end the occupation, both directly and via national governments across the world. It needs to harness the energy of BDS and pro-Palestinian activists, away from purely negative condemnation of Israel towards a positive strategy of targeting the occupation with the aim of creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Organisations that devote all their energy to appearing moderate enough to appease the establishment are likely to fail in this task; without a genuine and unflinching analysis they deny themselves the resources they need to actually make a difference.

The American Dream is one of upward mobility, but also sideways movement. The aspiration to greatness comes with a rhetoric of self-sufficiency that causes people to move along and start again, rather than navigating existing structures. Not only was the founding event of the United States a secession, but the most traumatic moment in American history — the Civil War — was also a failed attempt at the same thing. From Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Splendid Isolation’ to the libertarian Tea Party movement, the United States has tended to view government involvement as an intrusion and to laud those who start afresh over those who try to improve what already exists.

The frontier myth romanticises the West as the place where American ideals of equality, democracy and innovation are forged. Despite 82% of the population already living in cities by 2008, the metaphors of individual freedom are still predominantly rural. The most iconic of these is the cowboy — beholden to no law but that of natural justice — who can ride off into the plains carrying nothing but his six-shooter. If you don’t like the current system, just “get out of Dodge” (a phrase made popular by Gunsmoke, the legendary television show about the settlement of the West) and start again.

This individualistic Western mythology has had little hold on Jews. For Jews in America, as in Europe, 20th century life was predominantly urban and communal. From generation to generation Jews dealt with their own existing structures, whether scriptural, legal or political. While some have, of course, rejected the community, growing up Jewish has inculcated a pervasive sense of struggle with self-governance, whether through Talmudic pilpul, fights for civil rights or communal wrangling. The urban concentrations of a community whose traditional skills were best employed in the cities and the tribal nature of a community that is both historically close-knit and closely-knit to its history has meant that completely abandoning the past and moving on is less of a simple option for American Jews. It is no coincidence that the great renewal legislation of American history—Roosevelt’s New Deal — had profound Jewish support.

Dealing with renewal rather than replacement is not an exclusively Jewish preserve. However, the systems of Jewish life have provided a stepping stone for those who want to study this. Jews have been central in questioning and revising structures of thought and society, from Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud in Europe to the founders of literary, linguistic and social science in America. And, as has been often noted, even the recent theorists of foreign policy neo-conservativism were Jewish — trying to reform the world through belief in American hegemony. Most visibly, perhaps, in the world of contemporary commentary, Jewish intellectuals prominently provide insight into the systems governing respectively economics, social construction and politics. From Paul Krugman on his Nobel-powered pulpit at the New York Times to Malcolm Gladwell propagating virally from The New Yorker to the vastly influential Jon Stewart at the intersection of satire and news on Comedy Central, systemic analysis is still coming from the people who brought you Noam Chomsky and Milton Friedman.

But the American dream has always been an unwieldy admixture of the personal and the theoretical, bypassing the implementation. From the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty to the inspirational story of Barack Obama, the country leaps from an ideal to a biography without dwelling on the systems or institutions that might allow ideals to unfold into reality. Partly this is true because of the rapidly evolving nature of the nation, partly because of the increasingly vested interests in the status quo and partly because of the influence of the media. Hollywood, as its paradigm, purveys a relentlessly optimistic set of American possibilities.

The palpable atmosphere of possibility in the United States of America — the world’s first ideologically established nation — comes from this sense that if atfirst you don’t succeed, you can give up and try something different. From this impetus comes, on the one hand, America’s proclivity to waste time, space, energy and people but, on the other hand, profound freedom to create. In David Simon’s The Wire, which Jacob Weisberg of Slate called “the best television show ever,” there is no such freedom or energy: only compromise, concession, constraint and, eventually, capitulation.

Based on Simon’s experience as an embedded reporter with the Baltimore homicide unit, The Wire was an urban drama set in Baltimore that unfolded over 60 hours of television in five seasons between 2002 and 2007. The first season was based around a homicide squad that gets permission to use a phone tap — the eponymous wire — for surveillance of a drug gang they have reason to believe is responsible for a number of murders. But rather than just playing out like another cop show, The Wire evinced a deep sympathy for the social structures that created the drug dealers and their world. From the very start it showed the policemen suffering the consequences of their actions and, from season to season, it changed focus from the black underclass to neglected union workers at the docks, teachers, politicians and journalists all making their own desperate attempts to deal with the eroding social fabric.

The Wire is profoundly televisual. Weisberg praises the show though for its ability “to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.” Such literary comparisons have been widely made — The Wire is frequently painted as Dickensian by critics, but it is closer to Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine in its profound humanity, breadth of scope and realistic cast of characters whose centrality varies in any given story. Ultimately though, the comparison with literature is flawed. In Dickensian fashion, Simon’s writing is rich in social critique but television, unlike literature, has no recourse to the interiority that is the sine qua non of the literary. We never know what the characters are thinking, only what they are doing, over and over again.

Films are often too short to allow for the types of examination that systemic scrutiny demands. Although occasional cinematic epics like Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoleon, Mankiewicz’s 1963 Cleopatra or Lanzmann’s 1985 Shoah are able to bring several hours of inspection of both people and systems, that breadth of scope is a rare exception. A season of 13 programmes has a series of rhythms and micro-rhythms, repetitions and variations that is simply not attainable in a single long-form film. These remarkable films echo down the decades but, unlike The Wire, their profundity is inexorable (a gradual unfolding) rather than incessant (a continual series of variations on a theme). The Wire has been compared to a movie because of its high production values and unremittingly intense dialogue. The comparison, though intended as a compliment, is misguided. Each of the five seasons is not a 13-hour movie, but a television series, with the driving cycles and repetitions that implies, meaning that each interaction is loaded with the weight of previous encounters. Each repetition and reevaluation is like the cyclical reading and reinterpretation of the Torah and, more universally, like the repetition of the working week.

Taking its cue from its niche on the subscriber network HBO, The Wire is deliberately dense, layered and occasionally just plain difficult. Itself a product of the new television world of the 1990s, the cable network HBO did not rely on fickle advertisers but on subscribers. The Wire took full advantage of the creative freedom to push the boundaries of verisimilitude both in characterisation and dialogue. It became famous for its constant (and, by all accounts, realistic) use of the word ‘fuck’. The script of an epiphanic five minute scene where detectives Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) and William ‘Bunk’ Moreland (Wendell Pierce) revisit a murder scene is entirely, and brilliantly, made of up f-word cognates.

The show has redefined the limits of televisual form and evolved a whole new language of television. Through short episode-long cameos and long multiple-season story arcs, Simon and his co-writers have created an encyclopaedic dramatis personae of nuanced, fully realised characters including black and white dockers, union leaders, lawyers, politicians, drug runners and disadvantaged 6th graders. The complex, lifelong relationship between the childhood friends who run the Barksdale drug gang in the first three seasons is no less lovingly explored for their status as murderers. Perhaps the show’s greatest achievement is giving the African-American underclass a fair voice and a realistic context.

According to Simon: “All the things that have been depicted in The Wire over the past five years — the crime, the corruption — actually happened in Baltimore.” But, as with his book Homicide, the depth of sympathy that Simon is able to elicit from his audience, is the key part of a fiction that makes you not only believe in it, but care about the situation. For example, straight-speaking Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen) is a would-be reformist politician who sees with some clarity what needs to be done, but vested interests are against him and, as he observes in the fourth season, voting is deeply racial: “I still wake up white in a city that ain’t.” Carcetti wants to make a difference but the price of power is compromise and the cost of compromise is the cutting edge of reform. Despite their intentions and backgrounds, there is, in the end, little difference, between the almost comically corrupt black politician, Senator R. Clayton ‘Clay’ Davis (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) and the newbie Italian American one. Both have learned to play the system and yet both are, in their own ways, its victims.

But, like Woody Allen’s early films about New York, the central character of The Wire is the city of Baltimore itself. Concrete power and unrealistic hope are the twin powers corrupting the city and, by extension, America. In thrall to an untrammeled local and global capitalism, the local community is victim to those in power and failsto hold either individuals or institutions responsible. At the heart of this failure lies the cursed American hope, which deludes and distracts in equal measure, suggests Simon. The advanced technology, after which the show is named, and which promises so much proves useless to the students in the under-privileged schools. Instead it is incorporated into the plans of the drug gangs on the streets, into the smugglers’ cover-ups at the automated docks, and misused in the new world of web-journalism.

By following legitimate and illegal institutions in parallel, Simon critiqued not only the democratic product, but the democratic process as it is lived in 21st century America. Teachers, lawyers, policemen and city bureaucrats are subject to the same systemic dehumanisations and temptations as drug runners and drug sellers. The difference between their motivations is tiny. That they do not end up in the same trouble is as much the result of their initial privilege as it is a result of their resolution. In its portrayal of good intentions gone bad — not least in the heart-rending depiction of Bubbles (Andre Royo) the perpetually reforming drug-addict, caretaker and part-time informant — it savages the banal, yet fatally distracting hope that lies at the heart of the American dream.

Even when concerned with something other than simple escapist entertainment, Hollywood has found it difficult to liberate itself from the personal. Whether highlighting the impact of General Motors’ factory closings in Roger and Me (1989), Reagan-era AIDS policies in Philadelphia (1993) or energy company cover-ups in Erin Brockovich (2000), health insurance in John Q (2002) or a hundred others, the critique is narrow and anecdotal. Only rarely does the corporate movie set-up address the systems that affect the success of the protagonist. In contrast, The Wire focuses explicitly on systems and institutions, from drug policing, unions, politics, education to the media in each of the series respectively. As Simon himself has pointed out:

“We are not selling hope, or audience gratification, or cheap victories with this show. The Wire is making an argument about what institutions — bureaucracies, criminal enterprises, the cultures of addiction, raw capitalism even — do to individuals.”

With movie-lite budgets, movie production values and poetic license, The Wire provides perhaps the most profound dramatic insight into the tragedy of America’s structural problems yet seen. The most damning revelation is, however, that well-intentioned people can hardly make a difference. By awarding a 2010 MacArthur Genius Award to Simon, the MacArthur Foundation added their imprimatur of approval to this dramatic insight. But, the brilliant, well-intentioned team behind The Wire seem, as they would surely have suspected, to have made no difference.

Annotated, book-marked, stickered, full of expostulatory scribbles, pencilled to-do lists on end-papers and exultant under linings these books are years of my life, of reading and re-reading. And of buying. For several years the mid-morning post to the studio was made up of cardboard packages of books, necessary books, bought in the middle of the night from Abebooks. I tick here for priority dispatch, look away from the total price because I am in despair, I am buying another copy of X because I need it now, need to find the list of donors to the rebuilding of the Burgtheatre in Vienna. I spend my advance buying books at night.

And now I’m finished and my office in the studio is a complete mess. I am making an installation of porcelain pots in lead-lined boxes for an exhibition, my firstinaproperLondongallery. It iscalled From Zero, a phrase I have stolen from an essay by Malevich and so there are books on Constructivism coming in and photos of his black canvases taped up on the walls. We have the photographer coming, and the people from the gallery, and collectors, and the novelist who is going to write the essay for the catalogue. I need some clarity, some space away from all these files of notes. So I struggle to put this strange archive into a shape—folders on restitution, anti-semitism in Paris 1880-1890, Levantine shipping—and then I struggle to put it away, out-of-sight, I won’t need it again as I am resuming my life. I am artist again. ‘We share many things’, goes the first letter. And the second. And ‘I’ve read your book’, some say, ‘and am astonished to find that my great-grandfather lived next-door’, ‘that your great-uncle worked in Y’, ‘that in Odessa my family knew Z’.‘We are distant cousins’ ,says a card in a shaky hand.‘Though my story is slightly different’, reads an email,‘I want to ask you…’

I have my grandmother’s recipe-book, a brooch, a single spoon. I have nothing. I don’t know my story. I need to tell you.

And there are letters re page 214. I think you’ll find that you have misspelled the title of Rilke’s poems.

So what can I do? I get up earlier and earlier to try and answer my correspondence. I sit behind a table in a bookshop and sign my book. I stand and talk about the book, about how I researched the story, about attempting to describe the shape of a diaspora, the journey into a series of silences about who my family was, where they came from. And all the time, muffled in England, clearer in America, there are the questions: So are you Jewish? Do you feel Jewish?

I start making another installation of porcelain. It is going to be behind glass: a vitrine of two hundred white and celadon-blue pots. Nine larger vessels in the middle and the rest arrayed around them.The structure of the shelves is based on a page of scripture, the words embedded in commentary. I call it Word for Word. This is my first time behind glass. We push the glazed front onto the cabinet with a sound of a gentle exhalation.The pots are caught and stilled: they rest. There is a feeling utterly unlike anything I have done before. And when I look at when it is finished and hanging in the gallery I realise that is only half the piece. I need to make another cabinet to hang next to it. This time the glass is opaque.The vessels seem out of reach. The cabinets are like two pages of a book: they need each other.

You try and tell a story because you think it is your story. You try and pack up a library.

Edmund de Waal’s porcelain is shown in many museum collections round the world and he has recently made installations for the V&A and Tate Britain. He was apprenticed as a potter, studied in Japan and read English at Cambridge. He is Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster and lives in London with his family.

Yale University Press, 2010

If the suggestive title of Jeremy Dauber’s In the Demon’s Bedroom attracts the attention of the casual passerby, it will have done more than satisfy the book’s author. Rather, it will have proven one of the book’s primary claims:a writer knows how to pique his readers’ interest. Moreover, an author knows how to anticipate his readers’ initial interpretive leap and, subsequently, how to prevent grave misunderstandings. Lest the reader think Dauber is an author of supernatural pulp fiction, he appends the subtitle:Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern. As the subtitle clarifies, Dauber’s subjects are those Yiddish authors of Central and Eastern Europe whose published works appeared between 1500 and 1700. And, just like Dauber himself, these are authors who invite readers into their demonic textual lairs in order to teach specific lessons.

For Dauber’s readers, this is initially a lesson in the readability and relevance of the early modern Yiddish literary canon. Dauber repeatedly argues that Yiddish literature of the early modern period is both aesthetically rich and genuinely entertaining. Here, as he announces in his multiple close readings, is a selection of writing that demonstrates a literary dynamism. Playful rhymes, layered allegories and subtle allusions abound, and are ripe for the interpretive picking. As the title of his work suggests, Dauber also focuses his attention on those Yiddish narratives that participate in the supernatural mode. The texts under discussion cross genre boundaries but are unified in their deployment of the fantastic, the incredible or the demonic. Investigating fables, short stories and rhymed narratives, Dauber leads his readers into a highly-stylised literary world of supernatural adventure and romance. Readers and scholars who might have otherwise relegated early modern Yiddish literature to a cabinet of historical curiosities are persuaded that to do so would be to ignore the literary pulse of this fabulous corpus.

Yet Dauber’s meticulously- researched analysis does not aspire to be a glorified ghost story, nor should it. After all, the task of In the Demon’s Bedroom is not merely to entice contemporary readers and academics to appreciate early modern Yiddish literature, but to identify the sophisticated audience of these works at the time of their publication. Dauber rejects the assumption that Yiddish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, by virtue of being written in a Jewish vernacular, was necessarily simplistic, or that it catered to a correspondingly simple-minded reading audience. Yiddish male and female readers, he contends, were not the watered-down counterparts of educated male readers perusing contemporaneous Hebrew writing. Rather, these Yiddish readers demonstrated mature reading sensibilities. Not only would they have understood various biblical, liturgical and Talmudic allusions but they would also have been able to negotiate the strong strain of Hebraic vocabulary in the Yiddish literary record. Moreover, Dauber argues, these readers were distinctly aware of genre conventions and would, therefore, interpret and assign meaning to deviations from genre norms. Similarly, if a narrative line stumbled, readers were quick to recognise the slip. For example, when the readers of a fable in R. Moses b. Eliezer Wallich’s 1697 Seyfer Mesholim (Book of Fables) are first told that a certain innkeeper is a paragon of cunning intelligence, only to see him engage in utter folly, it becomes necessary for the narrator’s voice to intrude. Accordingly,some two dozen lines justifying the discrepancy follow the incident and textually respond to the readers’ implied scepticism.

Most interestingly, Dauber recuperates the discerning profile of this Yiddish readership by turning to the supernatural mode announced in his work’s title. When these readers were confronted by images of the fantastic and demonic, he argues, they would have registered a range of responses on the spectrum of scepticism and belief. This is evidenced by various explanatory or scene- setting statements that the early modern Yiddish writers introduce at moments when supernatural narratives stretch the bounds of believability. As Dauber shows, these were techniques echoed throughout European literature of the period in works no less refined or supernaturally-inclined than Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus or Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As he did in his first book: Antonio’s Devils (2004), Dauber bolsters his argument concerning early modern Jewish literature with a discursive foray into early modern English drama. It would seem that both Marlowe and Shakespeare’s work demonstrates the same awareness of an increasingly sceptical and epistemically sophisticated audience as that identified by Dauber in a Jewish context. More than a comparative digression, the analysis of the text and performance history of Marlowe and Shakespeare’s plays suggests the larger implications for Dauber’s historical reconstruction of the Yiddish audience. Although, as Dauber strongly asserts, these texts were written for Jews and by Jews at specific times and places, these are also texts in conversation with the broad concerns of early modern European literature and society. Dauber’s work further implies the potential of such a conversation by bringing together the works of leading Yiddish literary scholars, such as Jean Baumgarten, Jerold Frakes and Sara Zfatman, with
recent cultural histories of witchcraft and demonology in early modern Europe.

The texts cross boundaries but are unified in their deployment of the fantastic, the incredible or the demonic

Whereas Dauber must convince his readers of the literary sophisti- cation of the early modern Yiddish audience, he contends that theYiddish writers of the period did not need to be similarly persuaded. They were, as he demonstrates, already aware of their readers’ varying intellectual and analytical profiles. These Yiddish authors wrote for a readership that was attuned to subtle literary gestures and the manipulation of text and symbols towards political ends.This is most evident in Dauber’s reading of the she-demon tale, Mayse fun Vorms (c.1520s). In his analysis, Dauber attempts to recover the interpretive paradigm that may have guided the Yiddish reading public at the time of the text’s publication. Briefly put, the tale concerns the erroneous engagement of a wealthy Jewish son to a murderous she-demon. The she-demon subsequently kills off the son’s first two wives and is then, herself, destroyed by the third wife in a subterranean demonic bedroom (hence the title of Dauber’s work). At the end of the tale, the third wife is alive and wealthy. She is left in a position far from the impoverished state in which she had been betrothed to her husband—a position of poverty she had previously compared to death.

Contemporary interpreters have read the story as a polemic against intermarriage or a literary exploration of threatening female sexuality. Yet, as Dauber’s close reading demonstrates, what may appear today a moralising tale about sexual relations would have been read in its time as a warning against the exaltation of wealth and ownership as values unto themselves. Dauber carefully maps a network of biblical allusions and recurring wealth-related imagery in order to demonstrate how the text condemns the coercive power of money. However, as he carefully notes, the text does not act with the goal of disturbing a social hierarchy that privileges the wealthy over the poor; the hierarchy should persist while the values of wealthy Jews are reformed. Most interestingly, Dauber shows that Mayse fun Vorms does allow social mobility in certain cases; for example, if one follows the model of piety, obedience and normative gender roles exemplified by the third wife. The discerning Yiddish reader would decipher this social message by carefully attending to the system of allusions and symbols underpinning the narrative. Dauber demonstrates that paying similar attention to the literary techniques of such works as The Tale of the Spirit of Koretz (c.1660) and the Tale of Briyo and Zimro (c.1580s) allows contemporary literary historians to identify the former, a dybbuk tale, as a valorisation of communal action and the latter, a Judaised romance, as instructions for negotiating Jewish rights under a hostile Christian ruler. Dauber also posits the Tale of Briyo and Zimro as a test case for how the Yiddish author as cultural transmitter ‘perceived (and, perhaps more daringly, even constituted) the audience’s perspectives on cultural adaptation.’ After all, the tale directly draws on conventions of non-Jewish chivalric romances that were popular at the time. Yet Dauber shows that common tropes of the genre were adapted with various modifications and transvaluations.The text does not advocate for ideals of chivalric love. Rather, a close reading of the tale reveals the lesson that any ‘attempt to generate an authentic mixture of the external and internal, chivalric and Jewish worlds’ must be relegated to the world of fantasy. It is only in the world of the dead that the story’s Jewish heroes, Briyo and Zimro, can marry. What emerges from Dauber’s work is a sense not only of the Yiddish reader but also of the Yiddish writer as a cultural activist and moraliser who anticipated, responded to and shaped the future inclinations of his reading audience.

Accordingly, In the Demon’s Bedroom may rightly be labelled a work of recuperative scholarship. Dauber self-consciously reads each tale as an intricate artistic construct, and, in doing so, he mines the canon of early modern Yiddish literature to unearth the interpretive profiles of its readers and the moralising agendas of its authors. He demonstrates that to descend into the demonic Yiddish bedroom—into the world of early modern Yiddish readers and writers— is to discover a complex network of literary and semiotic exchange. Readers who were dismissed as merely functionally literate and authors who were labelled condescendingly as ‘popular’ appear as active, sophisticated players in a dynamic reading community. Dauber’s scholarship lays the groundwork for similar recuperative efforts and we may well wonder what other authorial and readerly spectres may be lurking in the Jewish literary archive.

‘I’m waiting for the scenery to look more like how I’d imagined Israel and less like rural Pennsylvania,’ thinks Sarah Glidden, as she stares from her bus window at the plain, flat landscape on her ride north from Ben Gurion airport. Combining light-hearted humour with both the harsh and mundane realities of Israel, this scene is representative of her graphic novel, How to Understand Israel in Sixty Days or Less, the award-winning comic artist’s first book.

The memoir takes place over several weeks on the author’s first trip to the country. Twenty-something Glidden, a self-declared liberal who is pro-Palestinian and critical of Israel, and who has a non-Jewish boyfriend and few Jewish friends, decides to get to the bottom of the Arab/Israeli conflict by going on the free Birthright trip offered to young Jews who have never before been to the country. She expects to be critical of the programme’s ‘propaganda’ and, once there, does not disappoint herself: she repeatedly questions whether Israel had the right to take land from the Palestinians and Bedouins, and probes the real meanings behind nationalist myths like Masada. But soon her strict liberal outlook starts to crumble. She finds herself falling for Israel, or elements of it: its own left-wingers, its compelling history , the feeling of belonging.

Her journey takes her through the contemporary political landscape she came to explore and into a more complex landscape of culture, history and powerful emotions. At every stage, her identity and her preconceptions are challenged by the confluence of these different forces and the book’s appeal lies in the honesty with which she confronts these.

Questions rather than answers are what she collects on her journey, from characters who not only represent different political viewpoints but are themselves multi-faceted, complex, defying stereotypes: her guide, who is pro-Wall for the safety it offers but empathetic to the pain it brings; her cousin, who moved to Israel to study medicine, but hates how Arabs are treated; an orthodox rabbi who values human respect above religious law; an American who thinks the Arab nations should help the Palestinians, but can’t stand Israelis and their rudeness; an unreliable peace activist; a left-wing youth leader who asks why progressives are anti-Israel – shouldn’t they be pro things? Glidden’s smart, passionate take on complicated people and positions results in an emotional journey, complete with insomnia and tears, calmed by the presence of her level-headed, soya-milk and yoga- obsessed friend Melissa, who isn’t afraid to tell her to take it down a notch.

The book is narrated not just verbally but by watercolour graphics. Glidden paints herself as a frumpy, arty type, and the characters she meets are portrayed astutely and comically, in simple cartoonish figures with dots for eyes, reminding this Canadian of Lynn Johnson’s early For Better or For Worse. Particularly memorably drawn are the girl from Orange County, who brazenly mistrusts Arabs, wears enormous sunglasses and a scarf and is seeking to ‘meet hot Israeli soldiers…what-ever’; the fashionable New Yorkers who wear fitted vintage coats; and the chubby trip organiser in wire-framed glasses. Glidden shows us the country, too: the view from Masada, green kibbutzes in the Golan, Jaffa. Her graphics are most exciting when they jump into the surreal, casting herself in historical scenes and conversing with fantasy figures. She debates with the pioneers who came to build up Palestine (‘Wait, but what about the people who live there already?’) and her nights are peopled by imagined characters—from prehistoric man and woman to Ottoman tax collectors—who had once slept in the same spot she now lies. A painting accuses her of insensitivity; a Bedouin speaker gives her the honest speech she longs for. She listens cautiously as Ben Gurion explains how he never wanted to infringe on Arab rights. Through courtroom scenes she dramatises her recurring question:‘Is Birthright trying to brainwash me or is it actually pretty reasonable?’, including herself in these frames in a direct personal link with the political and the historical.

The narrative is strongest when she is most open abouher fears and preconceptions: are the soldiers on their trip the ones that actually bulldoze houses? She is too uncomfortable to ask. Learning that her Republican travelling companion is not homophobic, as she has assumed, makes Sarah consider whether she has misjudged others as well.‘I’m ashamed to admit to myself that I like this feeling of being in this room [full of Jews],’ she confesses. ‘I’m even more ashamed at how much I didn’t like being outside of it.’These are moments of reflection on the path to maturity as Sarah learns to tolerate people whose opinions she does not share and she starts to ask if the Israeli/Arab conflict is no-one’s fault —if both sides did what they had to in order to survive.

Every memoir is a selective retelling, but some of Glidden’s omissions are distracting. It remains unclear why she chose to go on Birthright—a state-funded trip known for its agenda—when there are many ways for a first-timer to explore Israel (there’s no such thing as a free trip!). I was left wondering why she was looking for this fight, and wanted to know more about the background to her identity issues: Where did she get her liberal politics? Did she have any Jewish sympathies before? Glidden mentions that her non-Jewish boyfriend is concerned that she is being brainwashed by Zionists; I wondered how the trip made her feel about their relationship. She also briefly notes that her brother died in an accident. This harrowing insertion took me out of the story—I wondered if that was the same brother who had gone to Israel in the past, and how this tragedy may have played into her identity struggle? I would have preferred more of this backstory, in place of her longer researched segments about Israel’s history: though interesting, they sat awkwardly in the personal story, and her emotional demeanour detracted from their credibility. Ultimately, perhaps, this remindsus that most arguments about Israel are emotionally driven, and drives home her point that objectivity is difficult if not impossible to achieve.

Despite being 200 pages, Understanding Israel is a quick read and a compelling tale, presenting varying arguments and stories about Israel in an easy-to-understand way. Glidden should be commended for taking on this heated topic and treating it with honesty, self-reflection and humour (‘So it looks like Purim really does have a lot in common with Halloween in the states… it’s just an excuse for girls to dress like sluts.’) The book will appeal to those who have felt a conflict between their liberal views and their connection to Israel.The blend of simple prose with sparse drawing style gives the serious themes additional impact; and though the memoir poses rather than answers questions about how liberal Jews can feel sympathy for Israel, it also captures the tastes and smells of Israel with great accuracy. I could taste the borekas as I read.

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.

Translated by Jessica Cohen

More than half a kilometer lies behind you and still you show no physical signs, your pulse holds steady at a moderate rate, you sweat only lightly, and although you are wearing heavy army boots instead of your running shoes, and the cold and hunger will doubtless take their toll further down the road, you will probably keep running like this, without stopping even for a moment, and your footsteps will be audible on the asphalt throughout the night from here all the way to the lights of Jerusalem, and you can listen to them with the relief of knowing they are your own feet, and the familiar tranquility of running—or rather, the familiar oblivion of running—will ease the burden of the next few hours, the fear of what lies hidden in the villages on either side of the road, and the damp, sticky coolness of the wind, and the burn of the smoldering red ember in your gut, and you know how the precise rhythm of your steps will translate into syllables and words and melodies, you know this from the hundreds of races and meets and runs, and although the conditions tonight are especially harsh, harsher than ever before perhaps, still your victory is assured, because tonight you will conquer the urge to run, or at least, with the sharp knife of night air that rips through your lungs, you will dismember the viperous tuber that has impelled you to run for over three years now, and all you must do is stick to the confident, manly beat of five and slide yourself, head and rifle, down into the stupefying motion of shin and thigh, using the centrifugal force to drown the needle-thoughts and the pin-thoughts and the rhythmic beat of the ember, so that the sight of her merciful-blue eyes or the memory of her fingers singeing your skin only ten minutes ago might surface in the watery expanse of your mind and float away, and you will grip the road with your feet again and again, propelling your body ahead with a broad but measured step, and maintain your breath to the beat of five so that you will not stop even for one moment on this long road that winds among Arab villages and tiny green plots and grapevines, and onward through the village of Sho’efat that sleeps with its eyes open, and you will run further down the narrow, pitted road to Jerusalem, which will blink at you in bewilderment with its nocturnal amber stoplights, and silently you will glide along the treeless boulevards of stone, and you will weave through the city like its walls aglow in the dark until you find the riverbed that leads to the sea, and even if you go less than half the way, it does not matter because tonight you are both the runner and the finish line, and the results are predetermined, yet still you will keep running as hard as your lungs allow, and in the past few minutes you have covered over one and a half kilometers, and at first, when you had just left the boy’s home, you moved in total blindness, staggering on your dizzy, disobedient feet, but then they found their natural rhythm and supported your body from below, and you were carried along like an animated being shedding perfect tears of glass, on your strong muscles that rescued you efficiently from the core of anguish that needed three people to bear it, and awakened your lungs to the rhythm and your blood to the beat, and it was they who led you confidently past the headquarters’ huts and the roll-call yard and the mess-hall, and from there, skipping quietly and mechanically over the slack rope at the camp’s entrance, to the main road that leads to Jerusalem, and it will take several minutes to accustom yourself to the idea that it is your body that is now exposed to the night winds and the odors of gasoline and burnt rubber that waft up from the road rushing beneath your shoes, and to the faint whispers coming from the villages that huddle as you pass them by, but this thought is obstructive and weakening and you will banish it from your heart and continue to run along the yellow line on the side of the road and fix your gaze on the drops of yellow that dance through the damned tears until you no longer know whether they are the village lights or only the stripe refracted in your tears, and in fact it is of no importance so long as you can flood them with rhythmic barrages of the blueness of the boy’s cousin’s eyes when she looked at you, and that was what sequestered you from his room only moments ago, wading through the turbid nightmare that erupted inside your head, fleeing, seduced like a moth by the lights, sacrificed with every step on the altar of the keen magnet that patiently waits behind you and inside you always. Foot road shin breath pause, air inhaled and compressed, one two three four five, breathe, everything is under control, including the usual stab of pain, run, launch words into the air and fly on them, or even just meaningless fragments of syllables, like the ones Yoash emitted in his final attempt to trap you, or perhaps the boy’s secret words that had no fixed meaning, and the more you keep speaking into yourself the more the foreign voices from outside will die down, the bitter bray of a donkey or the distant engine of a car, and you will be able to hear her voice better, even the loathsome giggles she emitted at first, so long as you understand her eyes, even if the cost is the rhythmic pain of the ember that has glowed in your innards for the past three and a half years, whose pale radiance you sometimes imagine you can see through the layers of flesh and skin, from that spot where it began to whisper many years ago, though only your mother’s X-ray eyes noticed, for she told you explicitly when she turned off the engine outside Yoash’s house and looked at you in the rearview mirror that even though she and Yoash believed this was merely a temporary crisis, it was still best to try and make good use of this unpleasant situation because, after all, we are thinking-people, and we must vigorously confront any obstacle or confusion we encounter and remove its sting by profoundly, and sometimes painfully, scrutinising the facts and the deeds, and it is possible, and please bear in mind that she does not say these things decisively, that your developmental pace up to now, all your accomplishments and successes throughout your fifteen years, have come too fast, perhaps, and have posed a certain danger to your true inner rhythm, to your personality structure, and she has guessed these difficult things, she has known them, she has preserved them in her mind for many years without wanting to utter them, but then this temporary, foolish crisis came along,

The familiar tranquility of running—or rather, the familiar oblivion of running—will ease the burden of the next few hours, the fear of what lies hidden in the villages on either side of the road

and with it the time to say these things, and she will tell you one more thing now, because this evening she sees you are willing to listen, which might be a sign of things to come, so she will tell you that life, son, is a long-distance run, and you have perhaps not paced yourself correctly, and so you have stumbled a little, and how fortunate that you have parents who love you and care for you and understand you, who are willing to give you any assistance, and if you let us help you, we will, and so now get out of the car and go into Yoash’s house and do not cheat him and turn off the light he leaves on for you, because I will be sitting here in this car just like I have done every Sunday and Thursday for the past year, week after week, from now until nine this evening, one whole hour, and I will wait for you to come back and I will watch the house, and I do not want to see the lights go off as soon as you go in, not only because it is unfair to Yoash, who believes there is a light on in the room, but because the light will force you to think, son, to be alert and vigilant, and that is also part of the profound scrutiny which I spoke of, and now go, I will wait. She is sleeping now, my mother. Every night at exactly midnight she covers her typewriter. Then she stretches, and from my room I hear a short sigh of pleasure. Now will come the rhythmic breaths.Ten sit-ups to strengthen her aching back. A few seconds of relaxation. Here come the dull clicking sounds. Sitting in her study, she cracks the joints of every finger. Father calls it ‘driving the nails in the day’s coffin,’ but she says it’s just the daily maintenance of her work tools. Everything that happens from then on is predictable too, and for that reason transfixes me: the hum of the electric toothbrush, the deep gargling of water in her throat, the decisive nose-blowing, the final rituals of the night. At twelve-thirty she is asleep, utterly indifferent to the staccato echoes of her routines still oscillating between the walls of the house.

All your accomplishments and successes throughout your fifteen years, have come too
fast, perhaps, and have posed a certain danger to your true inner rhythm, to your personality structure

Years ago a radio interviewer asked her if she wrote in the wee hours of the night,‘which are so felicitous for contemplations.’ Mother told him nights were for sleeping. In my room I would count by my heartbeats the time that passed from the moment they wished each other good night until I heard the sounds of her gentle snoring. Then Father would turn the light off and roll over in bed. A few hours later, on my way to the bathroom, I would look at them. Two pale beans in their pods on either side of the bed. I could have gone in and slept between them and they would never have sensed me. Me and another child. But always, as I stood there in wonderment, my mother would suddenly growl at me in the dark to go back to my bed at once. She always saw me, and I was never surprised—she had said more than once, after all, and often promised: Mother will see you wherever you are, son.
Now you must pretend, you must imagine, that this is a race—let’s say, the race for the Chief of Staff cup that will be held in a week, or next month’s inter-command track and field event, and in any case the silence around you is extremely sharp, the roar of the crowd and the chatter of the politicos and the grating songs over the loudspeakers all fade away after the third or fourth lap, replaced by the blood drumming in your ears, and the delicate pearls of thought shine their light, the events observed from their insides, the embered whispers, and all that time your feet drum a regular beat, and on the fifth step, where the inhalation ends, there will always be one breathless second, and again the five exhalation steps, and now too, in the lucid quiet around you, there is no one to surmise that this is not one of your public runs, that the low, tangled bushes are not coaches squatting by the side of the track, that the pale rocks are not referees or slightly bemused overweight clerks, and how fortunate that thus far, and it’s already been more than fifteen minutes, not a single car has driven past to violate the darkness, and you can keep running in peace, engulfing the night with your transparent web, like you used to do when you had only just learned of the serenity that comes with running, and together with your father you would spin around your childhood neighbourhood, make its streets gallop beneath your shoes, envelop it in the thin mesh of fibres you secreted from your brain, and after you had left him, tired and chuckling and defeated, at the doorway to your house, you would assail the side streets and the alleyways again like a silent bat, traverse the yards and the men and the women and the children, suffocate in the dense bubbles of their dreams and their strenuous groans, and not for a single moment did you wonder why you did this over and over again or what the meaning of this new pleasure was, except that every night, at an almost fixed time, you were once again unable to tolerate the tapping of the typewriter and the drumming of your father’s fingers on his lap while he listened to his choral LPs on headphones, and you had to get out immediately, you had to run even before you had finished tying the shoelaces of your sneakers properly, to conquer your secret routes again, and this thing that you were unable to explain to your mother when she wondered, and wondered again, and said that although she did not discount healthful athletic activity in and of itself, for some reason your new physical enjoyment, your physical addiction, if she were being accurate, seemed to her the furthest thing possible from healthful, and while she did not wish to judge in matters she did not understand, she had to tell you that there was a certain brutishness in the pleasure you derived from moving your feet, but, as she said, perhaps she simply did not understand it, and if you could ever manage to explain yourself clearly without stuttering, you might convince her, because, after all, you know she always admits her mistakes.
Here comes the first car, floating silently round a distant bend, its headlights striking the sky and the hills, and you must slow down a little and be prepared to slip onto the side of the road, where you will freeze like a stone or a rusty piece of iron junk, but for now, as long as it is distant, as long as it is silent, it’s best to keep running because the night is short and the work is plentiful, and the light of day, this you know already, will destroy you with its evil rays, its warmth will dissolve your nocturnal powers and thwart your painful sallies from the misty night into the inner darkness, where you are still allowed to maintain that which exists and the reddish ember does not trouble you with unfamiliar burns, because in the past three and a half years you have kicked it onto hundreds of asphalt strips and race tracks and sandy beaches, and you have dulled its sting along the imaginary elliptical line you ran around in stadia and huge sports arenas, and you have diluted its pungency in your classmates’ seething whirlwinds of joy, and the proud cheers of unfamiliar soldiers from your camp, and the slaps on the back from fellow athletes, so that you can now deceive yourself, you can believe that within you there lies a darkness almost like the one that teemed between your father’s hands when he allowed you to peek excitedly, or like the kind in the boy’s closet, where he took you so that you could teach him the double-mirror game, and even as your glazed reflections danced in front of you, turning you both into an intangible vision, even then you did not ask him what was troubling him, and in fact you never asked him a thing, because you knew very well how injurious the tone of the question would be, having spent the last three and a half years in a furious and exhausting effort to defend yourself against the stinging questions they dug into you, and even now you cannot rid yourself of those impenetrable tunes, which you gratingly repeat to yourself to the beat of five every time you run, what’s happening to you, what’s gotten into you, where did we go wrong, who is to blame, and over and over again those words, that slashing motion, alighting from the lower depths of guile and reaching upwards, where they ram into your refusal, stubbornly gather the shards of their fall and glide upwards again, this time carrying demanding hostility, you are to blame, only you, you hide, you lie, and for a deceptive blink of an eye they let you be, the kind and merciful people, and consult with one another, and they are so impertinent that they do not hide their intentions from you, they genially explain their methods and approaches, all with the friendliest and lightest of

It’s best to keep running because the night is short and the work is plentiful, and the light of day, this you know already, will destroy you with its evil rays, its warmth will dissolve your nocturnal powers

attitudes, as though you were their partner, fighting on the same side, because what do they want, after all, they do not wish to harm you, or to hurt you, God forbid, their only desire is to help you, to lance the distress you harbour and allow it to trickle out so that you can go back to being as you were, and again and again they sigh involuntarily when they remember the child you were, such a talented boy, who won over the hearts of adults and children with his special wit, his sense of humour, which was not at all childish, and with his wondrously quick mind, but that is not what we are discussing now, not at all, and that, they tell you audaciously, is something we will surely come to as we continue our interesting conversations with you, and at this stage we are willing to settle for the bare minimum: that you talk to us, that you give some clue about what happened to you or what it is that you fear so much, and in fact, that you stop walking among us like a bitter and burdensome riddle. But pay attention, the yellow headlights are emerging around the bend too quickly, throw yourself to the side, be careful, you almost hit the rock, nicely done, and now keep running, do not stop even for a moment and do not look back, carry me, feet, one two three four five inhalation, one two three four five, like a silent glowing owl the Mercedes cut through the night, and in the illumined chamber you saw a fat Arab man with a cigar in his mouth and next to him a woman, not young, perhaps a little tipsy, who laughed inaudibly, and now the single molecule of light has melted into the mountains like a hovering firefly, leaving in its wake the odour of burnt gasoline and cigar smoke and women’s perfume.

Excerpt from Runner (title story from the collection Runner, 1983)

David Grossman was born in Jerusalem on January 25, 1954 and studied philosophy and theatre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is one of the leading Israeli writers of his generation, and the author of numerous pieces of fiction, nonfiction and children’s literature. His work has been translated into 25 languages around the world.

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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William Heinemann, 2010

The death of the historian and essayist Tony Judt in August 2010 attracted a great deal of media attention. Much of it was dedicated to his journalistic writings on Israel, including the first three paragraphs of the obituary in The Daily Telegraph, five paragraphs in the obituary in the New York Times and three paragraphs in Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s piece on Judt in The Guardian. Most extraordinary of all, the BBC News website dedicated almost its entire news story about his death to his views on Israel.

This is simply bizarre and distorts Judt’s achievements as one of the outstanding historians of his generation. It is true that Judt wrote a series of polemical articles about Israel, mostly for The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Nation and The New York Times and that these did receive widespread media coverage, especially in the States. However, most of these articles were written over just four years, between 2002-06, with a couple more op-ed pieces for The New York Times in the last year of his life. These coincided with a series of polemical (and equally fashionable) articles attacking Bush’s foreign policy, especially the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq. But this was only a tiny period of Judt’s career. It was hardly the main focus of his work even at the time, when he was completing his most famous book, Postwar (2005) and writing several important essays on social democracy and modern European memory. And without being particularly disrespectful to Judt, his writings on Israel were hardly very original or interesting, and pale beside the importance of the rest of his writings in recent years.That they caused such a stir reflects more on the strange state of the Anglo-American Left than it does on Judt’s career.

Now that the dust is settling, a few months after his death, it is possible to see his legacy more clearly. Several interesting essays, especially in The New York Review of Books, including an outstanding tribute by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of the recent Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, have redirected our attention to Judt’s work as a historian. Now we have a new book of essays, The Memory Chalet, which remind us of his range, his central passions, and his outstanding qualities as an essayist and intellectual.

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And once again, a feeling of superstitious terror took hold of the enemy: Were the ones attacking them people, could they be mortal?’ In a slightly modified form, these and other words from Vasily Grossman’s essay ‘The Direction of the Main Strike’ (1942) are engraved on Mamaev Kurgan memorial on a hill overlooking Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad. Grossman’s words refer to the shock of Nazi forces as they faced the heroism of Soviet soldiers fighting under Stalin’s order: ‘Not a step back’.The Soviet victory at Stalingrad turned the tide of World War II, but it could not stop the Shoah. When the Soviet troops, Grossman embedded with them, came to the death camps in Poland in the summer of 1944, most of the Jews of Europe had been annihilated.

The Jewish-Russian writer and political thinker Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) is not identified as the source of the seething words carved out on the Stalingrad memorial. Grossman’s deletion—words ‘popular’ author ‘unknown’,— constitutes much more than a double twist of black Soviet humour. According to John and Carol Garrard, Grossman’s dedicated biographers, the absence of Grossman’s name on the Stalingrad memorial is an ‘open wound’ on the writer’s legacy. Fifty-nine year old Vasily Grossman died in Moscow of stomach cancer, devastated by the Soviet efforts to erase him from history. His novel Life and Fate, a comparative indictment of Stalinism and Hitlerism, had been ‘arrested’ by the KGB in 1961, leaving him free to die of illness and grief during the headiest years of the Thaw. ‘They strangled me in the back alley’, Grossman had said to Boris Yampolsky, author of the novel Country Fair (1940), a lament for Jewish life in the former Pale. Ironically, some of Grossman’s loyal official supporters were the ageing generals he had interviewed at Stalingrad, who understood his love for the ‘holy Red Army’ and the extent to which it had bolstered the war effort. In orchestrating Grossman’s literary death, the regime was symbolically murdering the legacy of the people’s war against Hitler while also pogromising the Soviet memory of the Shoah.

Born Iosif Grossman but accustomed to being called Vasya (diminutive of Vasily), Grossman adopted the emblematic Jewish-Russian pen name ‘Vasily Grossman’. His first novel, Glück Auf!, a Soviet Germinal devoid of desire or violence, is stronger and less formulaic than his next novel Stepan Kolchugin (1937-1940), a story of a working class youth’s path to Bolshevism. His early prose of the 1930s is a search for his own voice, via the styles and artistic devices of other Soviet writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Perhaps Grossman’s greatest inspiration was Chekhov (he would title one of his Stalingrad essays ‘Through Chekhov’s Eyes’; the essay zoomed in on the experience of the famous sniper Anatoly Chekhov). To write in a form that resisted pathos and narrative closure would remain a lifelong aim, even as a Tolstoyan novelistic ambition pulsed in his temples. These early works gave little indication of the authorial voice Grossman would acquire in 1941 at the war front reporting from the trenches, gathering his material directly from the fighting soldiers. There is courage and sacrifice in his wartime articles, but there is also humour and tenderness; despite being a time of personal trauma the war against Nazism was also, for Grossman, a time of glory—literary, civic, and military. For him and many other Jewish soldiers, including poets and novelists serving as military journalists, this was a war with double the cause and double the commitment. (In the notebooks, Grossman recorded a comment by a Jewish commanding officer that ‘in a war like this Jews should be fighting like fanatics’).

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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.