I saw my mom last night and she talked about D.D. Guttenplan’s superb new book about I.F. Stone, American Radical. A New York friend of hers knew Stone, and she’s reading it and getting into all the delicious old ideological battles around Communism in New York.
I was provocative with my mother. I have read a lot of the book, and the interest for me is seeing how much of Stone’s commitment came out of Jewishness: his outsider journalism came out of his Jewishness, his Communism came out of Jewishness. By Jewishness I mean the Jewish experience in western society. This is my lens, and it seems to me that neoconservativism and Zionism and communism (at least the Jewish New York variant) were Jewish responses to feelings of powerlessness in America.
I said to my mother, "How much of your friend’s communism came out of Jewishness, a sense of a Jewish interest, and not of a working class interest? Because a lot of those Jewish communists weren’t working class."
My mother pointed out that her mother’s second husband was a Communist, and a merchant marine. He was working class.
I conceded that, but said that many of the Jewish intellectuals who supported Communism did so out of purported concern for the working class. When maybe they were supporting their own interest, as Jewish outsiders.
I gave up the point soon after. I realized that I was taking away my mother’s pleasure in her friend’s leftwing beliefs. I was being a jerk. We agreed that I would go talk to her friend some day.
I had a nightmare that followed from the conversation. I was at a party at a non-Jewish neighbor’s with my wife and a young woman who looked like my mother as a young woman. The young woman was talking about someone who was coming to the party, who she was excited about seeing, the Schwartzes. I said, Well you know the difference between the Schwartzes and our host? The young woman shook her head. I said very deliberately, "The Schwartzes support an apartheid state in Palestine."
The young woman’s face fell. My wife glared at me, angry at me for souring another social situation. I got up and left the room. As I walked out, the floor shifted, and my glass of water spilled.
It turned out I was on a train, careening through the hills. Suddenly there was a call to prayer. A Muslim next to me fell to the floor and for a second I thought I must join him, but I stood on my feet, davening next to another Jew. I watched the other Jew, to see what I must do, because I don’t know the religious forms.
The religious service went on and on, as they do. I went on to the next carriage, and sat on a religious Jew’s lap as he prayed. It seemed the correct religious order. I sat on that orthodox man’s lap for nearly an hour, till I looked around and the service was over, and I got up.
Outside it was snowing, and the train tore angrily along the rails and up through the mountains. It switched this way and that, shrieking against the rails as it gained elevation. Behind us a pickup truck came flying along, with a man with a cigar in his mouth at the wheel. He was angry and glared at us, and the train careened forward, in fright, trying to avoid him. We were much stronger than him.
I thought about the nightmare all day. The man in the pickup truck reminds me of anti-Semites, and the train feels to me like Jewish history, like all the eastern European trains that my own ancestors took to escape pogroms and that Herzl took to try to wrench the Jewish state from the Turks and the Russians.
The train was rising, and Jews have risen. I’m in Jewish history, too, figuring out my place in Jewish history. Right now the history is out of control, careening along with apartheid. But I’m not in much control either. I spilled my glass, and upset my mother. I am confused by the religiosity. I have to figure out a better way to think and talk about these things.
Your dream is about identity. Your discomfort with the Jewish forms may not have been discomfort with Jewish forms, but some personal alienation. Its not necessary. You can be fully Jewish and dissent. You can actually put your muscle into the identity without risk.
I would respect that in your Mom, that she had efforts that she invested her body in.
Did you read Gershon Gorenburg’s comments on his quandry on being an orthodox liberal Jew that regards his discomfort at seeing Palestinians harmed and/or discriminated against AS a component of his Jewishness. It is necessary to not allow the right and rationalizers to steal our jewel, actually argue in terms that they must address at some level.
I take seriously my responsibility to be a good person, and specifically a good Jew, and reinforce that by daily meditation, prayer and some study, and by intentionally helping others in ways that I am able.
Why is it necessary to be not only a good person but a jew? What’s the difference between being a good person and being a good Jew? Is there a DNA connection as
there is with certain medical afflictions?
Dude. Phil. You need to relax. I have followed your blog for a long, long time (…since the start…) but you are going a bit off the rails. This stuff is wrecking your life. You can be a forceful advocate for equality in Israel-Palestine, or Israstine, or whatever we want to call it, and still keep your family and friends. Let me suggest you explore ways of balancing that…
BTW Stone was an absolute genius. I read his book on Socrates as a young man, after Stone had already died, and I’ve never forgotten it. There’s a fantastic review of it by Myles Burnyeat – the Cambridge philosopher – in the London Review of Books for c. 1986, or 1979, or whenever it came out. You may be right that he wrote all this stuff out of Jewishness, but as a goy I was totally, totally struck by his complete humanity. Let’s raise a glass to his memory.
Gellian, above all else, what makes Mondoweiss a compulsive must-read 10x a day is Phil’s personal entries. As compelling as Herzl’s diaries, I might say.
Interesting. The pickup truck holds a frightening spot in the Jewish psyche! To be honest, I would think that most poeple who drive pickups are philo-semites, and I wouldn’t think that many smoke cigars, either.
A train might get you there faster and without personal effort, but you can’t stop it and
you only get the passing view it provides–and derailment affects all on board.
Now, a pickup truck…
Catholics were far more powerless than Jews, and were (and are) more represented in the working class, but they didn’t turn to radical ideologies like Zionism or communism. I wonder whether Jewish radicalism is caused not by the situation Jews find themselves in at the given time, but by long-standing grudges against the goyim and contempt for their religion. I saw a left-leaning Jew criticize the neocons for their alliance with evangelicals over Israel, his concern being that Jewish groups like the ADL were “going soft” on Christianity. What he was really saying was that the proper role of the Jewish minority in a society is to be fierce antagonists of the majority religion. Is that a typical Jewish view? And is it fair to demonize the majority for anti-Semitism when they antagonize Jews back, as they inevitably will?
Is Phil confirming the existense of the radical, self-serving Communist Jew that countless non-Jews have been have been crucified for mentioning? I wonder if he is ready to affirm the existense of the radical, self-serving civil rights and diversity pushing Jew? That would be a real breakthrough. He migh lose his rights and privileges for that!
Talk of Jewish extremism reminds me of a program that I saw last May Day about Jewish involvement in (running) the Communist movement in the U.S. during the early part of the 20th Century. The marches in NYC were massive, and the Jews involved were definitely a hostile foreign group. I see no reason for a people who chose to come to a nation where they have been allowed prosper to carry such a grudge, but it happens. I see similar traits in Indians who transfer their grudge towards the British to any Westerner. Should such behavior be tolerated?
The feeling of apartness that goes with the claim of “figuring out a place in Jewish hostory” pisses me off as an American. Maybe it shouldn’t because that is Phil’s personal choice. But every Jewish activist or professor that tears at American or Wetern history or culture makes me less inclined to not pass judgement on people like Phil. Clearly, Jews are chauvanistic, and I don’t think such behavior should be tolerated. Until the nation is completely torn apart by ethnic strife, Jews should be held in check like everyone else, no matter how powerful they feel in relation to the people they identify as their enemies.
Phil mentoned the anti-Semite in the pickup (talk about ethnic stereotyping!) and I wonder what Phil’s definition of anti-Semitism is? For many Jews the term is a weapon, rather than a way to accurately describe something. I believe that the term anti-Semitism is meaningless at this point, and see far more anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-white or anti-European sentiment coming from Jews than the other way around. Where is the anti-Semitism? I truly don’t get the sense of Jewish superiority.
What if it is a premonition? Try not to anger any non-jews that smoke cigars and don’t take any trips to Montreal to ski this winter. All jokes aside, it might be your fear of persecution and Jewish exclusion(!) is wearing on your emotions. You desire a clean conscience as a Jew living in America, but you’re encapsulated in the train surrounded by symbols of your religious history. It’s sounds like there’s a lot on tension and claustrophobia in your dream because of the train. You can’t stop it! The train is mean and headed to the cold, and your not sure if it suits your plans…
Your forced to go along with your history and you can’t change anything about it.
That’s why it frightened you.
“I was provocative with my mother.”
Gee, Phil, your about fifty years old. Don’t you think you’re getting a little ahead of yourself. Fifty is much, much too young to even think of challenging, let alone provoking, your mother! Show a little respect, young man.
Oh, by the way, Phil, smoking pot will stop those nightmares. Stopped mine, anyway.
I used to have this horrible dream (my family moved while I was away at summer camp. I was homeless until they got a new listing in the phone book. You didn’t think of that, did you, Dad? He just about fainted when I turned up.) that I was on a plane with my family, they had sold the house and we were moving to Israel! I awoke screaming, flailing my arms, drenched in borscht and sour cream. That’s what I get for leaving it on the bedstand in case I awoke hungry. What, that doesn’t happen to you? Why should I have to get up, get dressed, go downstairs, when I can have a snack beside me in my slumbers?
It is interesting that you use this analogy of a train, I see this as a metaphor for the direction we are moving in as people in the world. You could reduce it down to the systemic direction and movement in the USA.
I see two rows separated by an isle, on the left you have the lets say political left, and on the right you have the political right – there are several seats in each row, those on the inside are further to the left or right and those closest to the isle are the most moderate. One thing is glaringly obvious, no one controls the train except the powerful, it is moving in a predetermined direction and the control room to the engineer is locked.
The only difference between myself and the others on the train is that I am not there. I am on the tracks, and I am feverishly trying to find debris to derail the train so that it does not reach its final destination which benefits those in control and not the people.
V
Great POV on Phil’s dream. At the highest macro level, the train is the train of time, the insurance industry’s life charts. Next level below is your methaphor, how the world
is running on the tracks. Then your (sub)metaphor of the USA train particularly. But it seems pretty clear Phil’s version of his own dream depicts a train of jews, running along jewish powered rails, followed by atomistic anti-semites in pickup trucks with cheap cigars clenched between their teeth. Within any of those trains
your extended metaphor of the inside of the train works nicely. I am also not on the train, I am on the tracks with you, finding debris to derail all those trains. We don’t have a chance. History does not repeat itself for no reason. Eichmann lives.
I should have probably mentioned that the various left and right sitting in the seats are supposed to be our “leaders.” They put on a great show with the disagreements, to bad they are all consciously on a ride where they have little control, they just like to make you think they’re in control.
My grandfather worked the railroads, V. – the engineer controls forward and backward movement. Switches in the rails control the direction of trains. One doesn’t need to stop the train in order to change the direction.
My grandfather also worked the railroads in the age of steam, and my father in the age of diesel right up to the time Pearlman destroyed it in the USA; the simple mechanics
of rail switches is much too simple a metaphor for suggesting what needs to be done
to change direction.
Once you have stopped the train, then what? Can you stop a nation?
Margaret, are you suggesting that the train needs to be moving in order to be safe from the rest of the nation?
V’s metaphor: trying to find debris to derail the train
“I am on the tracks, and I am feverishly trying to find debris to derail the train so that it does not reach its final destination which benefits those in control and not the people.”
Thanks, Todd – I really only got pieces of V’s metaphor before I remembered seeing a railroad man bending over and pulling on a long iron bar that separated one set of tracks from where they joined with another; then watching as a train came toward us, and curved off one set of tracks onto another, to roar across a bridge and onward out of sight.
Loved those trains.
So I see the train as moving forward from past through present on into the future; I’m by the tracks, which runs across the property where I live in an apricot orchard. There’s a creek nearby and birds are raising a sweet racket
To me, It’s not a “bullet train” carrying commodities that make some people rich, while others are hurt and hungry; something obstructing the road for people who can’t get where they want to go until it passes; something alien to us.
Different era; different train, different vision. Same nation, seen differently.
Good luck to us all.
That was sweet, Margaret, seriously, but please reread Phil’s nightmare train dream.
And now on the actual Israeli Rwy System: Israel just instituted a hiring policy to favor Jewish Israeli IDF vets over Arab Israelis, who got booted since they can’t serve in the IDF in the first place:
link to seachange.wbumpus.com
And, BTW, the Israeli Rwy System engines and cars is now being updated by Germany; Germany will also maintain the new equipment.
Woke up from that reverie…
The International Transshiping Express yard burned down last night. A rat got into the transformer room & chewed through a cable. The fried carcass took the whole complex down; a short in the Corp.’s com line took their transatlantic network down. Mils lost – so sad…
The creekbank eroded out from under the big box cement slab they built over the orchard from where the tracks were right to the edge of the creekside – lousy logistics that was criticized from day one – guess there was stop-loss insurance or maybe ignorance is ignorance – anyway, there”s a pile of debris there now – but the train stopped running here long ago.
Got to get down to the local pol’s office and stand around in front of the door, smiling at the
staff who ain’t happy to find they have to go around to the other entrance… they need the exercise.
Phil’s gotta sleep again soon.
Those pesky rats, they chewed up my washing machine hoses. Looking for water
I was told. I said to the woman installing my new (expensive) hoses, “Must have been Palestinian rats.” She ignored me. They got my dish washer too.
lol
Save the hoses – get some mosquito fish, fill a container with water and succor your native wildlife.
Margaret Phil can’t get any sleep until I do. He is in for a long wait
V – Yeah, it’s been hard for me to sleep since Lebanon 2002.
That’s relative to Israel. It’s been hard to sleep since Bush said “we” were invading Afghanistan.