Freud and the early analysts (almost all of whom were Jewish) enabled psychoanalysis to flower as a marginal discipline offering a critical perspective on its host society. It thrived particularly because of the acuity with which it named sexuality as the core disturbance in European culture; in a society dominated by extreme sexual repression and hypocrisy, Freud named names. Sex was at the heart of everything. Sexual drives are people’s key motivational impulse (opposed by ‘ego preservative drives’), and Freud’s general picture of mental activity was based on a sexual metaphor. The ‘pleasure principle’, understood as a kind of orgasmic release of psychic tension, was the major principle of psychological functioning. Libidinal energy, held at bay and repressed, is always seeking freedom; if it cannot have it directly, it comes through as symptoms of disease, jokes and dreams. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

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

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

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

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Faced with far more pressing problems than the seemingly mundane matter of how to conduct its elections — war, enemies intent on its destruction, integrating hundreds of thousands of immigrants, building the new state, etc. — Israel ‘temporarily’ continued with the system. And it has been stuck with it ever since.
Israeli national parliamentary elections are conducted under a form of Proportional Representation, one of the variants of what is known as the Party List System.
Each party submits a list of up to 120 names — the total number of seats in the Knesset, the unicameral national legislature — which are elected nationwide (Israel being one single electoral district).
Following an election, Knesset seats are distributed as per the order on the lists — if party ‘A’ receive five seats, the individuals listed one to five on their list are elected to the Knesset.
The leader of the party deemed most likely to be able to form a government is invited to do so by the (otherwise ceremonial) State President. If they are not able to, within the timeframe allotted, another party can be offered the opportunity to form the government instead. The leader of the party who succeeds in forming a government becomes Prime Minister.
The only regulating factor in the virtually unimpeded translation of votes into seats is the Threshold, a bar that has to be passed before a party can be eligible to win a seat.
Until the elections for 13th Knesset (1992) the Threshold was one per cent, and during the 16th Knesset (elected 2003) it was increased from 1.5 per cent to two per cent. This is one of the lowest in existence in any PR system — with countries like Turkey placing it at 10 per cent, and with one as high as 20-25 per cent in Eire — which has proven increasingly significant to Israel’s political fortunes as the decades have passed.
The role a regulating mechanism like the Threshold plays in such a system is vital, with its size having a huge bearing on the ability of parties to win seats.  Where the Threshold is low, small parties have an opportunity to secure parliamentary representation, and thus many participate; when the Threshold is high, only parties with higher levels of public support have a chance to win seats, and therefore fewer parties participate.
The Threshold also influences possibly the single most important function of any electoral mechanism: the ability for a government to emerge from an election. When the Threshold is low the chances of a clear winner are low, for it is most unusual in modern democracy for a party to win over 50 per cent of the national vote, and coalitions become inevitable.
However, when the Threshold is high the chances of a clear winner increase significantly: votes of parties failing to pass the Threshold are either discarded or redistributed, meaning that a party winning less than half the seats can secure more than half of the seats.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

So what’s happened? Have we got so carried away with portable music players that we’ve lost our own voices? A clue lies, perhaps, in the only areas where it is still deemed acceptable to seek choral pleasure in public: places of worship and football matches (to be succinct, then: places of worship). Is it any surprise that song still embraces us where we are closest to collective transport, to the merging of many minds into one transpersonal being? It is significant that both Jews and football fans took to singing in response to a constraint: in the case of Jews, the prohibition against use of instruments, in the case of fans, the prohibition against physically smashing each others’ heads in.
So what can the music of synagogue and stadium learn from each other? Certainly, some football chants have felt the influence of religious hymns. Some of you may remember the awed, haunting paean to George Best that used to drift around Old Trafford like a mist: Geeooooor-giiieeeee. Anfield today resounds with a similarly dirge like: Liiiii-verpuuule. Liiiii-verpuuule. On the chirpier side, fans all over the country regale their rivals with a delightful ode to the rumoured complications in their family relationships: ‘Yer mum’s yer dad, yer dad’s yer mum, you interbred [insert regional name here] scum.’ Though the tune has been mistakenly ascribed to the Addams Family theme, the alert ear will pick up the clear influence of Adon Olam — in tune, if perhaps not lyrical content.
What, then, of influence in the other direction? Although the hymns of the siddur are replete with the yearning, the mourning, the passion and the joy familiar from the terraces, it could be argued that they are lacking the element of bile. For instance, though we rabbis are regarded merely as teachers, not holy men — eminent, perhaps, but eminently human —  congregations tend to treat us with a respect out of proportion to our station. Yet some of the irreverence meted upon football referees might be healthy. We would become more assiduous in our scholarship, as well as less prone to hubris, if, for example, the incorrect pronunciation of a rare Aramaic word was met by rowdy chants of ‘You don’t know what you’re doing’ or ‘What a load of rabbis’.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

I love to strum the run

of tuneless anti-notes

these braided harps have strung

from post to post to post,

dividing fenced-in dogs

from lucky ones on walks

and Barbie-trapping bogs

of grass from sidewalks.

And when stray branches beckon

like wishbones from a shrub

I wish for one good weapon

and break off a billy club

with which I investigate

a picket fence’s gaps;

with which I decapitate

the weed between each slat.

And when the fence is iron

I clang my club across

its bars the way a warden

patrols his problem blocks.

But when these fences give

way to boundless lawns

my hand becomes the sieve

that can’t contain my yawns.

Only Sunday strollers and bicycle riders will notice

the strange facility concealed among vines and fields —

a long barracks surrounded by barbed wire, a guard stationed

at the electric gate.

It’s late.  The second night watch.

The villagers sleep. Only a few small foxes

and nocturnal birds to witness the sight.

The lord of the eggs rechecks the voltage

in the electrified fence.

He directs the trucks filled with cages,

hurrying the Thai workers

discharged to load the sick and the old

squeezed to lay all they can.

Hard to say when they become fowl.

This poem is not about chickens

pecking in the troughs, coxcombs trembling in light

which is neither day nor night

or birds piled one on top of another, their necks

twisting through the bars

to gasp the feathery sparks

in egg-white moonlight.

And even if it is, it doesn’t fly in the face

of the people who pass through the gate

to the factory store in the morning

under the cheery ‘Hatchery House’ sign

with the drawing of a plump brooder,

buying extra large eggs

nicely arranged in a carton.

the last leaves

on the trees

leaking their slow

reds and golds

the workers

sluggish in the fields

who are you

that I don’t know

how to look away

don’t want to    your eyes

entering mine

the day is short

the night

long    the Master near

Borges was a rara avis. The intelligentsia in Latin America, particularly the Left-leaning one, has never been particularly interested in things Jewish. (It isn’t overtly anti-Semitic either, although since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that intelligentsia has become openly anti-Zionist.) More often than not, Jews and their contribution to Western Civilization, are ignored. Is this silence a form of attack? Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize winner in 1990, never addressed Jewishness in an upfront fashion. Paz covered every single imaginable topic in the humanities in his magisterial oeuvre yet not a single poem of his deals with the Jews in general, let alone those in the Hispanic world. Likewise with Julio Cortázar, and Gabriel García Márquez. Exceptions to the rule are Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa. Fuentes has several novels on the subject: A Change of Skin on the Nazis, The Hydra Head on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Terra Nostra on the Jews in the Iberian Peninsula prior to 1492; and Vargas Llosa authored The Storyteller, about a Jewish anthropologist in Lima who becomes a griot among the Machiguenga tribe in the Amazon. Vargas has also, in his sustained non-fiction career, debated issues such as anti-Semitism and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Borges was interested in Jews, not as people overwhelmed with ideological interests, religious fervour and personal passions, but as abstractions. He was attracted to Jews as metaphors. This is not to say he didn’t socialize with them. While in Geneva and Spain during World War I, he befriended a number of Jews of Polish-Jewish origin, among them Maurice Abramowicz (about whom he wrote a poem in 1984) and Simón Jichlinski. They were ‘my two bosom friends,’ Borges wrote in the autobiographical pieces published in The New Yorker. He also became close to Rafael Cansinos-Assens, the latter a Sephardic author responsible for El candelabro de los siete brazos. But what attracted him was the Jew as symbol.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Heinemann, 2008, £20

In the early 1990s Tony Judt was in his mid-40s, a fairly obscure British historian, specialising in modern French history. Three things happened to make him one of the best-known historians of his generation. First, in 1995, he became Director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, just at the time when historians in New York were redefining  the way we think about modern Europe. Then, in 2005 he published Postwar, the masterpiece of the new European history, a monumental 900-page, acclaimed account of Europe since 1945. Finally, at around the same time as Postwar, he wrote a number of controversial articles attacking Israel and Bush’s war on terror. He had become one of the best-known public intellectuals in America.

Reappraisals is his first book since Postwar. It is a collection of essays published between 1994 and 2006. These two dozen essays mostly appeared in the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. This is Judt as essayist and public intellectual, writing about writers, thinkers and politics from the Cold War to the Bush Years. He is opinionated and fluent, a sort of east coast David Starkey, with more than a touch of nastiness. He rages against Israel, dismisses French Marxists like Louis Althusser, and eviscerates a recent biography of Arthur Koestler. But he has his heroes, too. Koestler and Primo Levi, Edward Said and Albert Camus, ‘the best man in France’. His heroes are Jews and exiles, mostly men (and the occasional woman) in the dark times between the Russian Revolution and the height of the Cold War.

There are interesting continuities between these essays, mostly written while he was working on Postwar, and his acclaimed history of post-1945 Europe itself. In both there is a dark vision. He has no illusions about Europe (or America). There is no happy story of progress and he reserves some of his sharpest polemics for the post-1989 optimism and faith in free-market democracy that followed the fall of the Wall. Much of the history in these essays is brutal. He writes of the violence of Prussian troops in 1815 and what Romanian soldiers did to Jews in World War Two. He admires Hannah Arendt for the way she grasped the central importance of terror in totalitarian regimes and approvingly quotes the Polish thinker, Leszek Kolakowski: ‘The Devil is part of our experience… Evil, I contend, is not contingent … but a stubborn and unredeemable fact.’

The rise and fall of Communism was, according to Judt, one of the defining features of the twentieth century, especially the mid-twentiethth century. He keeps coming back to the great anti-Communist tradition, both critics of Communism and ex-Communists like Koestler and Camus. ‘They are,’ he writes, ‘the twentieth century’s Republic of Letters.’ Some of his fiercest scorn is for Marxists who never saw the light — the French Communist, Louis Althusser, and the historian, EJ Hobsbawm. His review of Hobsbawm’s memoirs is one of the best essays in the book. How could Hobsbawm stay loyal to Communism, after all that had happened? ‘Seventy years of “real existing Socialism” contributed nothing to the sum of human welfare. Nothing.’ And yet Hobsbawm remained a Communist. He was undoubtedly one of the great historians of his time, and yet, ‘he has somehow slept through the terror and shame of the age.’

A third theme in these essays, also familiar to readers of Postwar, is memory or rather, mis-memory.  Perhaps the most impressive essay in the book is a magnificent review-essay on the colossal seven-volume Les lieux de memoire, about French memory and history. Judt has a keen sense of the feeling of loss at the heart of this project. Despite its apparent solidity — 5,600 pages — Les lieux de memoire is an attempt to preserve a living sense of peasant and rural France at the very moment it was disappearing. At that time the French Left and the Catholic Church, indeed France itself, as a great power, were all in decline. ‘France,’ writes Judt, ‘was thus modernizing, downsizing, and splitting apart all at once.’ France in 1960 would have been recognizable to Flaubert or Hugo. ‘The France of 1980 did not even much resemble the country just ten years earlier.’ This Herculean attempt to capture the essence of France and its past was problematic from the start, writes Judt. The problem was that the French had lost a sense of a shared past: ‘there no longer is a received version.’ Since 1918, the story becomes more confused, less glorious, more troubling. The Third Republic was easy to commemorate — all those streets named after Victor Hugo and Louis Pasteur. But the shame of Vichy? The dirty wars of Algeria and Indo-China? The decline of rural France? This is not unique to France. In the essays on Blair and ‘Heritage’ Britain and ‘The World We Have Lost’ we see that our relationship to the past is becoming more, not less, complicated. Even the recent past seems already remote. ‘The twentieth-century is hardly behind us, but already its quarrels and its dogmas, its ideals and its fears are slipping into the obscurity of mis-memory.’ ‘We wear,’ he writes, ‘the last century rather lightly.’

What can this mean? Surely the twentieth-century is still close to us? But Judt digs down to larger social changes which are cutting us off from the central experiences of the twentieth -century. As he writes about Koestler and Camus, he realises how remote these debates about Communism are to a generation born after 1989. War, or civil war, touched every European life in the first half of the twentieth- century. Now it is something which happens somewhere else.

Reappraisals is shot through with an overwhelming sense of loss: from the speed of social change that has eroded our sense of a shared world to the decline of the two great intellectual faiths of modern Europe, Catholicism and Communism On the disappearance of central and east European Jewry he quotes Manès Sperber, born in Galicia: “I am one of the last, one of the walking coffins of an exterminated world.”’

The nearer Judt comes to the present, the emptier and more desolate the scene. All the ideals are in the past. Communism; the belief in a free world, shared by Camus and Kolakowski; the idealism of the first generations of Zionists. All gone. . America has become shallow, unequal and strident. The hopes of post-1989 free market capitalism have become empty illusions. Blair’s Britain is ‘often squalid,’ the railways and hospitals don’t work, poverty is rampant.

And then there is Israel. There are only three essays on Israel, but they loom large. The first is a handsome tribute to his late friend, Edward Said, the second, a reassessment of the Six-Day War (his last piece for The New Republic) and the third, an all-out attack on Israel today, ‘The Country That Wouldn’t Grow Up.’

Taken together, these essays are the most provocative and controversial part of the book. A number of key points run through them. First, ‘Israel’s international standing has precipitately collapsed’, and, conversely, the Palestinians have replaced Israel as the object of international sympathy. Israel, writes Judt, is internationally isolated, a pariah, dependent only on American support. Secondly, the ideals of the European founding fathers have given way to a new militarism, nationalism and religious irrationalism. Finally, Israel needs a dramatic change of strategy, ‘a truly statesmanlike shift in its policies…’ These would include; dismantling the major settlements, ‘opening unconditional negotiations with Palestinians, calling Hamas’s bluff by offering its leaders something serious [sic] in return for the recognition of Israel and a cease-fire…’

At this point, Judt’s prose loses its analytic rigour and precision, becoming vague. Negotiations with ‘Palestinians’. Who exactly? Edward Said or Hamas (mentioned just once in the whole book)? Offering ‘its leaders’ (who?) ‘something serious’ (what?). Judt is quick to condemn, but he has nothing constructive to offer. His lack of empathy — Israel today is only the aggressor — leads to a jarring  one-sidedness quite distinct from his masterful, nuanced balancing of complexity in other chapters of history.When he writes about Israel Judt the historian and intellectual essayist descends into polemic and brawl. His tone becomes angry, hectoring and imprecise, as it does in his later attack on intellectuals — Bush’s ‘useful idiots’ — who supported the invasion of Iraq.

Raised in the East End, all his grandparents were Yiddish-speaking Jews from eastern Europe. His parents, he told The Guardian, ‘were leftwing, even Marxist, but strongly against Communism.’ As a teenager he was passionately pro-Israel — ‘I was a gung-ho, utterly committed, leftwing Zionist.’ Now, sixty, he has two modes for dealing with the loss of the two faiths that once drove him. One is a kind of mourning for a lost world, the other is a form of contemptuous rage Neither have much to do with the great historian who wrote Postwar and has helped us, through a lifetime’s work, with great sublety and care, understand the complexities, silences and darkness of our recent history.