The young Lessing
For the last few months I’ve been reading a classic of philosemitism: the "Martha Quest" novels of Doris Lessing. Set in Southern Rhodesia in 1936-1949 and published in England in the 1950s, the first four of these books trace the youth of a fiercely independent child of British colonials born, as Lessing was, in 1919.
Lessing is famous as a "kaffir-lover," to use the racist slang hurled against her; her hatred of the color bar resulted in her leaving Rhodesia for England in 1949 and culminated in her winning the Nobel Prize four years ago. But there are no major black characters in these novels, and really Martha Quest is a Jew lover. Determined to overcome her parents' anti-Semitism, she gravitates to the Jews in the provincial capital of Salisbury (now Harare, Zimbabwe).
A fatherly Jewish lawyer gives Martha a job so that she can leave her parents’ farm and move to the city. There Martha loses her virginity to one Jew (Eastern European "scum," he says), marries another (German Communist refugee), and has an intense affair with a third (Zionist Communist). A Jewish doctor prescribes contraception and tells her she's too far along for an abortion. Martha's Jewish friend Stella sets the bar on fashion and decoration, while Jasmine Cohen sets the bar on politics. Jasmine's cousin Abraham dies fighting in Spain-- and Jews are all over the small Communist party group Martha joins. (In her actual autobiography, Lessing has said that the Jewish mentors in these books were based on real people.)
But my business here is not to count the many Jews in these books. It is to express pride in my inheritance as it was perceived by a non-Jew. The sense pours through these books that were it not for the Jews of that generation and their “ancient culture,” Doris Lessing could never have become Doris Lessing. As brilliant a writer as she is, Lessing needed to break out of the thick racist porridge of the land-based cultures that surrounded her—the British colonials with their "Sports Club" snobbery and the Dutch Afrikaaner men with thighs like “pillars”—and to do so she threw herself on intellectually-sophisticated Jews.
At the beginning of the Martha Quest story, there are the Cohen boys, Joss and Solly, the “brilliant” sons of a shopowner in the small town of Banket, who recognize adolescent Martha’s intelligence and send packages of books to her every week or two. From the books of Communism and psychology, “Martha had gained a clear picture of herself, from the outside.” This becomes her greatest “weapon” in life, literary consciousness:
“She was not only miserable, she would focus a dispassionate eye on that misery. This detached observer, felt perhaps as a clear-lit space situated just behind the forehead, was the gift of the Cohen boys at the station….”
The Cohen boys in their Kosher household--Solly a Trotskyite Zionist, Joss a Marxist--are exact cousins of the Jewish intellectuals at City College in the 1930s.
At the other end of the Rhodesian books is Martha's tormented lover Thomas Stern, a paranoid refugee from Poland who has lost his sisters in the Holocaust and veers self-destructively from Communism to business, from Jewish terrorism in Palestine to human rights work on behalf of blacks. By scoffing at Martha's urging that he renounce violence, Stern gives the Martha Quest books their title: The Children of Violence series. But Stern is not only called to violence, he's called to retail:
“So you see how hard it is to escape one’s fate, Martha? In Poland, middle-men, money-makers—the Stern Brothers. And here? My brother’s a rich man already, and we left Poland with what we had on our backs, eight years ago.”
A lot of my writing on this site is critical of the Jewish political presence in modern America. But I have a chauvinist streak of my own, and Lessing's non-Jewish eye confirms it in me. The Jewish gift helped to form Doris Lessing as a young writer: the cerebral, text-bound life of persecuted Jews gave her awareness of the world and encouraged her to deliver the savage-sympathetic portrait of white colonial society that would make her name in England in the 1950s. That life is the Jewish culture that I was born into-- outsiders, people of the book, harsh critics of the social structure.
[Joss Cohen] fired the following questions at her, in the offhand indifferent manner of the initiate to a breed utterly without the law:
‘You repudiate the colour bar?’
‘But of course.’
‘Of course,’ he said sardonically. And then: ‘You dislike racial prejudice in all its form, including anti-Semitism?’
‘Naturally’—this with a touch of impatience.
‘You are an atheist?’
‘You know quite well that I am.’
‘You believe in socialism?’
‘That goes without saying,’ she concluded fervently; and suddenly began to laugh, from that sense of the absurd which it seemed must be her downfall as a serious person. For Joss was frowning at the laugh, and apparently could see nothing ridiculous in a nineteen-year-old Jewish boy, sprung from an orthodox Jewish family, and an adolescent British girl, if possible even more conventionally bred, agreeing to these simple axioms in the back room of a veld store in a village filled with people to whom every word of this conversation would have the force of a dangerous heresy.
Doris Lessing was an early adopter. Her philosemitism parallels the philosemitism of non-Jewish intellectuals in the States in the 40s and 50s, Edmund Wilson for instance, and anticipates by a generation or two full-blown American philosemitism of the meritocracy-- when the White House was loaded with Jewish advisers, when Clinton put two Jews on the Supreme Court, when Jews became university presidents and started google and facebook and craigslist, and neocons guided our foreign policy.
American philosemitism reflects the Jewish contribution to this society. Recently I was told that the world still envies the U.S. because of four industries we have that no one else has (universities/research, film/media, software, and finance), and all these industries are as full of Jews as Doris Lessing’s early novels were. As Scott McConnell, who had something of Doris Lessing’s own Jewish-engendered intellectual awakening when he joined the Commentary neoconservative crowd in the 1980s, has told me, America is thankful to Jews because they are driving the economy. I think this recognition pervades Establishment culture. When I fault Chris Matthews for never talking about the Israel lobby, I must be aware that the network that gives him his salary was built and is now owned by Jewish entrepreneurs in the new global economy. When we try and explain the dismissal of Ron Paul, it is because he above all candidates is representative of an Establishment structure that has no truck with Jews-- as opposed to Romney with his neoconservative advisers, Gingrich with his Sheldon Adelson money and Barack Obama with his Axelrods and AIPACs and Crowns. When I marvel that Robert Kagan works for Romney and his wife works for Obama without anyone raising an eyebrow, or that Stuart Levey the former Under Secretary of Treasury worked for Bush and Obama without a hitch—again, this is a measure of the large Jewish presence in the Establishment. Jewish gifts have propelled the new economy, such as it is. And when people accuse Occupy Wall Street of anti-semitism, it is in part because Occupy are critics of the new economy, and much of that economy was built by Jews.
Back when we were outsiders, Hannah Arendt warned Jews about reverence for wealth: liberal Zionists, she wrote, "failed to... attack the role of Jewish finance in the political structure of Jewish life."
That same warning is sounded in the Martha Quest books, from the restless Communist Zionist Thomas Stern:
“Unlike you, when I work, I think in terms of money. I’m learning that it's terrifyingly easy to make money.”
She laughed...
“I don’t want you to laugh about money. I’ve got to outwit it. I’ve got to find a way of not becoming Thomas Stern, rich merchant of this city.”
The beauty and tragedy of the Children of Violence series is that Thomas Stern does outwit that fate, at the cost of his own life. But modern American Jews are still stuck with Stern's contradictions. We’re Zionists, and we've been incredibly successful. With the success has come something that none of the provincial Jews in Lessing's philosemitic saga ever dreamed of having: power, which has eroded our outsiderness and endangered our detachment—that dispassionate eye on misery, that clear-lit space situated just behind the forehead.
It is not that Jews are incapable of that detachment. Many are. But the Cohen boys shared that gift a long time ago, and it is no longer just ours.
really interesting. you touch on so many ideas here. i’m not familiar with doris lessing’s writing but i am now intrigued.
an little factoid about myself. starting at the age of 17, inadvertently (unlike lessing) i too ended up being positively influenced by a number of jews i gravitated towards in my life. at the time tho i didn’t really understand or see them as jewish. but after a few years it didn’t escape my notice i had surrounded myself with a number of jews who ended up being very influential in the direction of my life. a few in particular really took me under their wings and they didn’t have to. i’ve often found myself in the right place at the right time with the right people.
Beautiful essay. Thanks.
“Lessing needed to break out of the thick racist porridge of the land-based cultures that surrounded her—the British colonials with their “Sports Club” snobbery and the Dutch Afrikaaner men with thighs like “pillars”—and to do so she threw herself on intellectually-sophisticated Jews.”
And now the “thick racist porridge” is Israeli, and Jews (and others) face the task of fighting racism (there as elsewhere) — or ignoring it — or joining it. Those who believe that Israel’s “thick racist porridge” should be privileged have, of course, “joined it”.
I tried to take the dispassionate position, that you so clearly value and I too on closer introspection, and look at the position of Jews in America and the Establishment over the course of 70 or so years.
I do not think it is an understatement to say that we changed America.
Harsh critics of the social order is not enough.
Overthrowers, even peaceful revolutionaries, of the social order is more apt.
I have noticed in myself that like you, one of the reasons why I focus so much on my own people is precisely because I share the chauvinist streak. I believe in Jewish power, I truly believe in it. If Jews as a group overwhelmingly decides to do something, or to prevent something, I deeply believe that we can be more successful in that area than virtually any other group, even one which is a hundred times larger than us.
But one of the issues that I keep thinking about today is, for a lack of a better word, purity. Purity of purpose, more specifically. Did we overthrow the old order primarily on moral rightouesness or for a greed of power? Both? And if so, how much of each?
I remember your story on the Winkelwossen twins, the true creators of Facebook, and then how Zuckerberg essentially swooped in at the last minute, stole their source code, hacked their site and was protected by the Jewish Harvard president, Summers.
Facebook’s not typical of the Jewish experience, but it holds a clue to the question I am grappling with. The racial taunts that Zuckerberg posted, and that were in some ways overmatched in the following Vanity Fair article mirrors what I think about the post-60s movement.
I’ll be frank: I think that one of the main factors that we today basically view racism as something mainly due to white people(meaning, European Christians) is the battles we had with them before. I think that in events leading up to the fifties and sixties, there was a lot of racial animosity towards the WASPs. A lot of that was hidden because the WASPs were morally bankrupt themselves, not least in their treatment of blacks.
But as I look onto the American scene today, it’s uniquely suited for racial minorities. If you are a minority, you can always claim persecution. Again, the flipside of my chauvinist streak is the attribution to Jews powers that we may not have, but it bears thinking about anyway. I felt, like the woman in the Beinart discussion at the GA recently, that I had been lied to. She had been lied to, she felt, about Zionism. I was growing up with very dark descriptions of my neighbours. We were not just smarter. We were more pure. Morally superior and culturally sophisticated. They wallowed in material wealth, but they were simpletons, brutes and worse.
As I’ve grown older, so much of what I was told has turned out to be a lie.
I now ask how much of what I was told was the result of my parents’ own bigotry?
This is why, I think, many Jews read anti-Semites. It’s a dirty pleasure, because it stokes our narcissism and gives us a way to think forbidden thoughts; to escape the condemnation of the self-hating Jew. And it’s reflected in jokes like the two Jews who are reading the newspapers during WWII and one Jew is reading the Nazi paper with misplaced, even bizarre, glee. Tired of all the bad news, he enjoys reading how the Jews are doing everything right and having supreme power.
There’s an element of this, I think, in the discussion I briefly mentioned and I want to seperate it, the childish narcissism, from genuine self-reflection. Why do I talk about the WASPs? Because their downfall had a lot to do with us, and if we see and look carefully what happened in those struggles we may, but for a brief moment, see if there are any commonalities today – how much was actually a critique of the society we lived in, in many ways horrible, and how much more was motivated by our own bigotry, was it motivated, and perhaps even, dangerous as it is to ask, our greed and lust for power?
If the answers to these questions are not as straightforward as I fear… then that may in some ways respond to the conflict vis-a-vi Israel/Palestine, where the solution ultimately rests within America’s borders and none so more than with us, the architects and enforcers of the Israel Lobby. The enablers, at it’s worst, of Jewish apartheid.
Yet, as you note, our history is filled with contrarians. We are told time and again, that to be Jewish is to be questioning. That there is an inherent value in argument and skepticism in it’s own sake. We are told, and we believe, that we are smarter. That we can self-regulate better than anyone else. And for much of our history in the diaspora, that was true. But here is the worst question of them all: what is that was because of our outsider status, not because of our internal values(or at least not sufficiently supported by them)? What if we had no choice to be the overthrowers of the social order, in part because that social order prevented us equal opportunity – and yes, power?
And now that we are part of the Establishment, and in many ways driving it, have we lost that ability? Is Israel the clearest manifestation of that? That we can be harsh towards others, even destructive, but are not simply up to our own mythologies of our supreme morality?
Have white conveservative Christians really changed that much in their basic world outlook, or is our alliance with them on Israel, even if superficial, a symptom of what I am talking about? That indeed it was us that changed. Or even worse, and nothing that Philip implied, that perhaps this was within us from the beginning but it was hidden from sight to others and even to ourselves as long as we were excluded? That is what I fear.
So Israel stands as the test to my questions. How much opposition to the old order was based on moral righteousness? If what we were told as we grew up was true, why then is Israel acting in precisely the way which we condemned the WASPs for, and now we cover it up amongst ourselves? Israel acts as the knife to the heart of Jewish exceptionalism.
It shows our thuggish side. The brave Cohen brothers have no power in Israel or even(!) in the Jewish diaspora. They are attacked as self-hating Jews.
In the Jewish state, the rulers are Avigdor Lieberman, Bibi Netanyahu and Danny Ayalon and the ultra-Orthodox religious establishment.
The questions I asked in the beginning are still with me, because they torment me:
How much of what we saw in the 30s, 40s and 50s, as Lessing documented, was righteous?
How much was hypocrisy, even, G-d forbid, naked self-interest ? What about the Communist Zionist in her book, is he a sign of this? Communism is opposed to nationalism, yet Ben-Gurion was a marxist and a nationalist. So were characters in Lessing’s book. We took exceptions to our own cause.
This is why I kept bringing up the WASPs, why I think Philip himself returns to the WASPs so often on this site, they are a key to understanding ourselves and how we deal with the world. The WASPs, together with Doris Lessing’s book raise the same question but from different angles, when contrasted with Israel and the total support for it’s apartheid: Can we only be truly moral when attacking the Other?
Thoughtful post, Krauss. The questions you ask in the last half need to be asked.
Kraus, you have a much more nuanced view on this subject than Phil who is still capable of uncritically repeating such ignorant drivel as this doozy:
“Recently I was told that the world still envies the U.S. because of four industries we have that no one else has (universities/research, film/media, software, and finance), and all these industries are as full of Jews as Doris Lessing’s early novels were.”
No one else!
Switzerland has done pretty good with finance historically. Greece and Rome had their heyday too. China is the economic superpower, and they are half socialist in ownership. One need not think in terms of supermacy of one group.
“Ben Gurion was a marxist and a nationalist.”
Nuh-uh. Marx was clear: Workers of the world unite. Not, Yes, you over there, gather round. But, you, over there, we got a special State for your own use. Come see us in private after this convocation.
Interesting for me to read, Krauss, growing up in my USA after WW2, the two groups I always experienced negatively as people with power and a superiority complex were WASPS (when I lived in small town America) and Jews (when I lived in metro/suburban metro America); over the years the Jews took over nearly completely. This does not mean I did not develop close friends from either group, but they’ve been the exception, not the rule. People like myself never appeared in any novels written by the Updike types or the Roth types, two examples of modern American literature.
I hope that you are able to overcome your distaste for WASPS, Krauss. You certainly showed no sign of it when you attacked me the other day.
Statements like this one don’t give me much hope:
I believe in Jewish power, I truly believe in it. If Jews as a group overwhelmingly decides to do something, or to prevent something, I deeply believe that we can be more successful in that area than virtually any other group, even one which is a hundred times larger than us.
As for your last paragraph in this post, I for one can’t make head nor tail of it. Can you explain what you mean by your last statement. Who is the “Other” pray tell?
This is why I kept bringing up the WASPs, why I think Philip himself returns to the WASPs so often on this site, they are a key to understanding ourselves and how we deal with the world. The WASPs, together with Doris Lessing’s book raise the same question but from different angles, when contrasted with Israel and the total support for it’s apartheid: Can we only be truly moral when attacking the Other?
@Krauss — Self-absorption and selflessness, and their respective causes, mused upon in almost equal measure, the degree to which one mitigates the other evaluated, and the concept of an abstract moral order to which humankind may be subject is recalled, almost a mini tour-de-force for an informed, reflective, modern, western Jew, a good model for anyone of any place.
For any Jew or Gentile, contemplating themselves and their people, careering around the region between self-apotheosis and self-abnegation, an very old Jew had some very good advice,
“Two things I ask of you, O LORD; do not refuse me before I die:
Keep falsehood and lies far from me;
give me neither poverty nor riches,
but give me only my daily bread.
Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you
and say, ‘Who is the LORD?’
Or I may become poor and steal,
and so dishonor the name of my God.”
– Proverbs 30:7-9
Boy, Phil, it sure seems to me you are skating on a very very thin edge of differentiation here. In short, the idea that one can be proud of something, but then say there’s no responsibility for the consequences of same.
Or, to put it another way, apropos of your talk of jewish involvement in communism—or even Zimbabwe as it has now too long turned out—I can just see someone rather archly asking “Because both have turned out so bloody well, right?”
Or, apropos your talk of jewish involvement in American “finance,” asking why then it would be so wrong to tag “jews” in particular for its, ahem, “problems,” such as the concentration of wealth we see, the flamboyant corruption its been involved in, and/or the economic wreckage we already see that has come about from the spectacular Wall Street follies we’ve seen over the last decade not to mention the possible terrifying meltdown some are predicting?
Don’t get me wrong: I think one can theoretically *somewhat* skate that edge successfully in at least some if not all circumstances, but I don’t think it comes out sounding all that great even in the best of them.
Just how much credit would we give, for instance, to any group that seemed to take pride in their idealistic passion for pulling Germany out of its post-WWI starvation … if that passion had led them for a goodly period of time to support the Nazi Party? Especially, say, if that support had lasted right up until the Nazis had turned on them in particular?
Being passionate and idealistic is all well and fine, but being right still matters, does it not?
Jewish people were uniquely well-placed to be critical of traditional Christian society and to press for positive change. Many of them played an essential role in creating modernity. For this, a debt of gratitude is due, but to the individuals concerned, not to the group, whose overall contribution was, like that of every other human group, mixed.
There is only one human race. There are no moral supermen, either by ancestry or by culture.
There is only one human race. There are no moral supermen, either by ancestry or by culture.
Thanks, mh. You are a treasure on this site.
Thanks for those really kind words! – Martin
yes, yes, yes, mh976
Never having been indoctrinated from youth that I was exceptional, or a birth member of any exceptional group of humans, but rather, that I was born in a free country and if I wanted something I had the chance to earn it (in upright ways), right now I feel slightly nauseated by Phil’s article here today.
Yeah there’s so much one feels is “wrong” about Phil’s article, though there’s no blaming Phil; above and beyond all his clear aim is just being candid and that’s a damn hard, rare thing.
Still, to the extent that he can be read one way he can still be “wrong,” and it’s interesting to see apparent commonalities between his possible sentiments in this article of his and Krauss’s subsequent comment here. And perhaps the most depressing is what can seem the still extant belief (if not indeed possible pride also) in a sort of permanent “class warfare” view of a sort. Just some sort of ineradicable viewing of everything through the lens of “who/whom” as Lenin put it. Of … some class or other. Way too often the idea that this is not just they way things have always been, but then too the way things should be as well. That … someone will always have their foot on the neck of someone else, so that the thing to fight for isn’t equality of opportunity, but instead that the foot just belongs to the *right* class.
I don’t give a rip if every politician and big business person was jewish so long as they got there by merit and didn’t hold the idea that, aha, now it’s “their” turn and instead didn’t *see* themselves as a “they” as opposed to anyone else.
Phil talks admiringly of Lessing for instance in her clear move towards seeing things in this class-ridden way, and Krauss even more clearly shows that world view when he asks, unconsciously condescendingly, “Have white conveservative [sic] Christians really changed that much?”
(This last being particularly piquant now given how Israelis and their jewish American partisans are essentially begging “the conservative Christian” U.S. to bail Israel’s sorry ass out of the mess it’s made of things in its neighborhood.)
Like Citizen appears to question, where’s the appreciation for the fact that … “conservative Christians” or at least conservative deists founded this country and originated and developed its theory of freedom and equal rights for everyone, including jews?
That while the much hated “WASPS” may have been insufferable, they stocked the institutions of this country with people who put to shame those now in their old positions in government and Wall Street and corporations in terms of having at least some sense of civic duty and noblesse oblige and meritocracy.
That the much hated Eastern European Christian ethnics were overwhelmingly among the ones who rejected Hitlerism and indeed defeated him? That, since their massive immigration into this country, and despite being looked down upon by the WASPs, they *eagerly* bought into the meritocratic ideal of a fundamentally “classless” society with equal rights for all?
Instead however what’s seen too much of in my opinion is the taking of the inevitable lack of perfection in the realization of these ideas so as to see and criticize things perpetually in terms of warring classes of some sort.
Except now, as Phil and Krauss so forthrightly talk about (which is why they are to be praised) we get to see how many of those jewish “critics” walk the talk because of Israel. Suddenly, it’s okay to worship an essential eliminationist and ethnic cleanser like Ben Gurion, and modern Israel as it ever more openly slides towards fascism. Suddenly with Israel it’s a different story and okay when Israel’s official Propaganda and Diaspora Minister says all arabs constitute a “deplorable nation.” When government-employed rabbis in Israel say that a thousand or a million arabs aren’t worth “a jewish fingernail.” Or when the official rabbi of the Israeli army says that mercy is a foreign value.
Like Citizen, I grew up with the idea that if you worked your ass off you had a chance. With my parents being first generationists of Eastern European Christian ethnics, from a country and indeed race particularly looked down up as slow if not downright stupid. And while they both accomplished large things eventually they had felt that growing up, and you bet they’d want you to bristle if you sensed any of it. But the one thing they never imagined even, and indeed would have regarded as the ultimate sin of a sort was if any of us kids ever started regarding ourselves as somehow *better* than anyone else.
In short, they knew enough to know that you can’t be against any kind of “class” distinctions while you simultaneously see your own group in any way as being superior to others. That … all that essentially constituted was griping over the *wrong* class distinctions being made and you not *being* the class on top.
….being superior to others
as in occupying someone else’s homeland and feeling self-righteous about it
as in owning a slave and not being ashamed of this
as in making a million dollars a year and feeling righteous about not paying taxes
as in walking past a begger without making eye contact yet denying personal responsibility for his/her “fate”
as in learning that 50 million americans have no health insurance and not being mad as hell about this
“power… has eroded our outsiderness and endangered our detachment—that clear-lit space situated just behind the forehead”
Um, you are talking metaphorically, right? LOLZ
So Philip, I hope the suffocating atmosphere of the Christmas holiday is the cause of your reacting with this “chauvinist streak of my own”, but what does this mean in the fight against Zionism? I think it always good to try to view the world objectively, not subjectively. Isn’t ethnocentrism a major component of Zionism which says “the Chosen” are unique and are therefore above international law and can therefore establish a theocratic Israel based on a several thousand year old tradition even if it is not shared by the indigenous population of the area?
I agree with you that, objectively speaking, there is a large Jewish influence far beyond the number of Jews in the population in U. S. culture today. As you know, because of the dead-end of Zionism, however, this influence is not always good for Jews or the rest of society. While I do not share your apparent belief in the omnipresence of “the Lobby”, I do think it has been able to exploit the crisis of international capitalism for theocratic ends.
There is no question that the intellectual and social pursuits of Jewish culture have had a profound affect on Western culture as you allude to in your article. Many of Lessing’s Jewish friends you cite in the article had probably rejected Zionism, if not religion itself, as the basis of their life. Freud wrestled with this in his last (controversial) book “Moses and Monotheism”. Regardless of the controversial historical questions he raised, the book is a psychoanalytical study of how the Jewish people were able to maintain their identity as the Other under many times horrendous social conditions. The philosopher Spinoza is another example of a Sephardic Jew who, in the 17th century, wrestled with being brought up as “the Other” and universalized his struggle against superstition to a world view based on science.
As someone who grew up in the Anabaptist tradition (Mennonite) where we were also considered “the Other” (we were taught to consider ourselves “the Elect”) I can appreciate your pride in the accomplishments of many Jews. My ancestors also suffered great persecution in Europe before immigrating to America centuries ago and many have maintained their ethnic identity through strict enforcement of religious belief. Ironically, many of my ancestors first went to Amsterdam in the 17th century before coming to America and some of their leaders, while rejecting Spinoza’s science, were influenced by his views on separation of church and state, views which played a role in Philadelphia during the Revolution. Unlike the many Jews who have made many great advances in science, however, my ancestors saw science as a threat to faith. As a result, many of their descendants are mired in a peasant mentality which is not far removed from the Middle Ages. So you can take pride in this heritage, but watch out for the “chauvinist streak”!
Thanks for this post, tombishop. Your gentle prodding, I hope, will encourage Phil to give up his “chauvinist streak” for good.
The paragraph on your Mennonite heritage was most interesting.
I sometimes think the Plain Folk in their horse and buggies are the only sensible people on the planet. They are in large measure a very peaceable group, and their aversion to science has meant that they play little or no role in the destruction of the environment. They also allow their young people a certain latitude, encouraging a period of “walk about” during which time they can decide for themselves if they wish to adhere to the old ways. Am I being too much of a romantic do you think?
patm, Thank you for the kind words. If you think a struggle for identity from the dominant culture is difficult as a Jew, the establishing of a progressive identity in the ethnic group I come from has not been a cakewalk!
I do not see science as the cause of the world’s problems and the rejection of science, as the Anabaptists do, as the solution. The problem is capitalism, a system where science is put to the use of private profit and not human need and progress. Ultimately, science is going to be the solution to our problems if it is freed from the profit motive.
The idyllic view that “the English” have of Anabaptists as a return to an innocent Garden of Eden where life is free from the problems of modernism is not something I share. There is something to be said for the collectivist lifestyle where the interests of the group are put before the individual’s interests. However, this is a double-edged sword. The Amish do allow the “walk about, but how many people are willing to give up their family and the identity of who they are to leave the group that they grew up in?
My view has been shaped by growing up gay in this subculture. My experience has been that if your existence is not found in Scripture (as they would frame it, “God doesn’t make mistakes”), then you cannot exist as yourself. Given a choice between recognizing the evidence of science and following their interpretation of Scripture, they always choose Scripture. (Which is why I am drawn to Spinoza because he was excommunicated from his synagogue for holding that the Torah must be interpreted based on the laws of nature as revealed by science.) My experience has been that the “very peaceable” Anabaptists can be quite totalitarian if they feel their religious beliefs are challenged by reason.
My experience has been that the “very peaceable” Anabaptists can be quite totalitarian if they feel their religious beliefs are challenged by reason.
Yes, tombishop, I was afraid my ‘pie in the sky’ analysis wouldn’t wash. Bible literalists are not noted for being open-minded. I can well imagine what it must have been like growing up gay and ‘progressive’ in such a community. ‘Difficult’ and ‘lonely’ would probably not begin to cover your experience.
“Doris Lessing could never have become Doris Lessing” – without the ‘jews’ you are saying, Phil.
Well I can’t think of ANYTHING more offensive to a talented writer than to attribute their gifts to an outsider and not to their muse (their inner inspired higher self).
You slap Dorris in the face in public and take away her fierce independence with such absurd and offensive claims about the ‘total power of the jews’ over her work. (Did it ever occur to you that her black-skinned African nanny may have had a profound influence on her too?)
Shame on you for taking away what is clearly hers: her OWN uniqueness and her OWN cognitive independence. She’s no intellectual Frankenstein being assembled in a literary laboratory by the ‘jews’, Phil. Ridiculous!
You need to send fresh flowers to her grave site as an apology and give her back her due credit. Fully.
Good for you, taxi. Another wonderful piece of writing.
One thing though, I can find no indication on the web that Doris Lessing is dead. Phil will have to find another way to make amends.
Yes patty-m, thanks for your admirable and consistent due diligence – I stand corrected: Doris, born 1919, is still with us – bless her cotton socks. (Terribly sorry dear old Doris but blogging and simultaneously yacking on the blower gives me the occasional brain raspberry.)
Also, Phil, Doris seems to be interested in one religion only: Sufism, a pacifist and mystical branch of islam that was introduced to her by her writer-friend, Idries Shah.
link to en.wikipedia.org
Doris Lessing couldn’t have become the phenomena Doris Lessing, without her various allies.
Doris Lessing couldn’t have become the combination of ideas and sensitivities that comprised her personality without all of her relations, and all of her personal choices.
Doris Lessing was Doris Lessing from day one existentially, everything genetic, everything of her upbringing, everything of her sense of “I” (that is the same throughout our life even as our personality grows and changes).
The biggest questions are what are Jews to become.
The class relationship in which those with multi-million dollar votes, compared to my 5, remains, regardless of ethnicity, even if ethnic patterns corrupt the top.
That would suggest that it would worth Phil’s or others’ time to direct their judgment to the individuals, to attempt to persuade them to cast their dollar votes more charitably and consciously, rather than habitually or carelessly.
Or, pursue social revolution, in the form of changing the nature of capital from individual (per Ron Paul’s commitment) to social (maybe via tribal, maybe via anarchic grass roots development of social capital, maybe via a new parallel state printing its own money on the basis of God’s natural gifts, maybe via self-appointed vanguard of the proletariat.)
until the last chain is broken none of us will be free
the last chain?
i’m superior to you
Phil’s writing reads like that of someone who has internalized both the chauvinism he claims to detest and the antisemitism he can’t seem to recognize.
Jews do not control the economy in the United States, and their prominence in the fields Phil cited is prominence born of a cultural tradition of educational excellence, not control or dominance. Jews do not wield any more political power than any other group would if they bothered to organize with others around the issues they cared about. Thus, Jews have organized with others around Israel and achieved success. Jews organized with others around civil rights and achieved success.
Americans (anybody, really), tend to respect people who are successful, hard-working, and contribute to society in some meaningful way. Jews with those qualities are overrepresented as a group. Certainly nothing to be ashamed about. It is the same with Asians and Indians.
Society works best when people can feel proud of what they themselves, and perhaps the groups they belong to, have achieved, can appreciate the same qualities in other individuals and groups, and can help those who have yet to achieve get to that point. Society works worst when people become jealous of the achievements of others, greedily claiming their own achievements for themselves and restricting others from matching them.
Phil’s identity angst sent me to my quotes book again.
‘Pride is the mask we make of our faults’
Hebrew Proverb
“Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Pride that dines on vanity, sups on contempt.
~Benjamin Franklin
It would be anathema to my New England Unitarian ancestors to even consider itemizing their influence on abolition, literature, academia, etc., while others financed the slave trade, the Confederacy, Big Cotton, several market bubbles, and both the north and the south in the Civil War, but this post calls for it. Tribal hubris is toxic, degrades everyone.
One of Phil’s best.
Although I am nominally Christian, I was married for 20 years to a German-Jewish women, with whom I raised two children in the 1960s and 1970s. We sent them to a progressive school where Hebrew was taught, the idea being that they could get a modicum of Jewish education in a progressive milieu. They problem was the Hebrew teaching materials: they were filled with anti-Arab racism and propaganda. The reason my wife and I became aware of this was because our kids, and all their friends, were raising hell about the Hebrew instructional materials. Why, they wanted to know, were they being given books with pictures of hook-nosed Arabs throwing bombs into the United Nations? Wasn’t that racism?
The people who ran this school gave us nothing but excuses. They also couldn’t explain why they didn’t teach the kids Yiddish, along with Hebrew. The literature in Yiddish seemed a lot funnier and more nuanced to me, and in many other ways better than the stuff available in Hebrew, and I felt like it had more to say about modern life. But the powers-that-were wouldn’t cop to us, couldn’t give us a straight answer. I began to feel complicit in something bad. Sadly, we didn’t take our kids out right away, even though my wife thought we should. I should have listened to her. Eventually, however, we took the kids out of the school.
My wife’s family had deep roots in the German Left and was an expert on Weimer culture. She explained at length how dangerous religious nationalism was, and how it was going to hijack American Judaism. I didn’t believe her then, but I do now. It was a tremendous gift, probably the best one I ever received, though she has been dead these many years. She even saw how Islam was going to be attacked by the West, and how right-wing Christians and Jews would work together against Arabs and Muslims. That, too, helped me, when in another time and place I became the father of a Muslim child. Then once again I saw the truth of everything my first wife had taught me, this time from the other side of the looking-glass.