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Israel, Syria, & the New Middle East Elliott Abrams, Itamar Rabinovich, Amos Yadlin JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS Volume 6, Number 2 Summer 2015 $7.95

Elliott Horowitz Berenson in the Details

Robert Alter Harshav’s Last Book Peter L. Berger Walzer’s Secular Paradox Dara Horn Stalin’s Jews Marci Shore Putin’s Russia Ethan B. Katz & Maud S. Mandel Exchange Views with Shmuel Trigano On Anti-Semitic Violence in France FASCINATING SUMMER READING Editor Abraham Socher From The Toby Press Senior Contributing Editor Allan Arkush

JOHN LENNON OPEN UP Art Director AND THE JEWS THE IRON DOOR Betsy Klarfeld A Philosophical Rampage Memoirs of a Soviet Associate Editor Jewry Activist Amy Newman Smith Zeev Maghen Avi Weiss Editorial Assistant “[Maghen] shows Jews how Kate Elinsky awesome it is to be Jewish” “Should be mandatory - Times of Israel reading for anyone working on social justice issues” -Huﬃngton Post Editorial Board Robert Alter Shlomo Avineri NEW Leora Batnitzky Ruth Gavison MENACHEM EDITION THE BRIDAL Moshe Halbertal Jon D. Levenson BEGIN’S ZIONIST CANOPY Anita Shapira Michael Walzer LEGACY SY Agnon J. H.H. Weiler Leon Wieseltier Collected Essays Ruth R. Wisse Steven J. Zipperstein “One of Agnon’s most characteristic stories, in its In conjunction with Mosaic ingenious and earthy humor” and Yeshiva University From the Nobel Prize Publisher committee award citation Eric Cohen Associate Publisher & Director of Marketing From Maggid Books Lori Dorr

DISCOVERING A TEMPLE THE CITY OF IN FLAMES The Jewish Review of Books (Print ISSN 2153-1978, Online ISSN 2153-1994) is a quarterly publication DAVID of ideas and criticism published in Spring, Summer, A Journey to the Fall, and Winter, by Bee.Ideas, LLC., 165 East 56th Source Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10022. For all subscriptions, please visit www.jewishreviewofbooks.com or send $29.95 ($39.95 outside of the U.S.) to Jewish Review of Books, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834. Please send notifi- cations of address changes to the same address or to [email protected]. For customer service and subscription-related issues, please call (877) 753-0337 or write to In conjunction with the Megalim Institute [email protected]. Letters to the Editor should be emailed to letters@ jewishreviewofbooks.com or to our editorial office, 3091 Mayfield Road, Suite 412, Cleveland Heights, THE PATER NEW! THE TORAH OH 44118. Please send all unsolicited reviews My Father, ENCYCLOPEDIA and manuscripts to the attention of the editors at My Judaism, OF THE ANIMAL [email protected] or to our editorial office. Advertising inquiries should be My Childlessness KINGDOM sent to [email protected] or call Elliot Jager Natan Slifkin (212) 796-1665. Review copies should be sent to the attention of the associate editor at our editorial office.

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JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS A Division of Koren Publishers Jerusalem Available online and at your www.korenpub.com local Jewish bookstore. www.jewishreviewofbooks.com MAGGID JEWISH REVIEW Volume 6, Number 2 Summer 2015 OF BOOKS www.jewishreviewofbooks.com LETTERS 4 Otherwise than J, Internalized Guilt, Were Arendt and Herzl Wrong About France? & More

Feature 5 Elliott Abrams, Israel’s Northern Border and the Chaos in Syria: A Symposium In the four-plus years since the Arab Spring, Itamar Rabinovich, regimes have fallen, alliances have shifted and re-shifted, and new (and terrifying) actors have appeared on the Amos Yadlin scene. The diplomatic and strategic assumptions of several decades seem to have been upended. Nowhere is this more dramatically apparent than across Israel’s northern border. What, if anything, should Israel do about the Syrian crisis? Reviews 9 Dara Horn Playing the Fool The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin by Ala Zuskin Perelman 13 Peter L. Berger Paradox or Pluralism? The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions by Michael Walzer 16 Allan Arkush Do You Want to Know a Secret? Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing by Arthur M. Melzer • Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings edited by Kenneth Hart Green • Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides by Kenneth Hart Green 19 Alan Mintz The Life of the Flying Aperçu Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental Education by Morris Dickstein 21 Robert Alter Give Ear O Ye Heavens Three Thousand Years of Hebrew Versification: Essays in Comparative Prosody by Benjamin Harshav 25 Deborah Hertz Fanny and Hilde Fanny von Arnstein: Daughter of the Enlightenment by Hilde Spiel, translated by Christine Shuttleworth 27 Sharon Hart-Green Tested Loyalties The Betrayers: A Novel by David Bezmozgis 28 Marci Shore Everything Is PR Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev 33 Rafael Medoff Desk Pounding and Jewish Leadership The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver and the Foundation of Israel by Ofer Shiff

Readings & REflections 36 Elli Fischer New Gleanings from an Old Book A new study of the book of Ruth by Yael Ziegler is an occasion for assessing the influential school of Orthodox biblical studies that began at Yeshivat Gush Etzion a generation ago. 38 Daniel Cotzin Burg A View from Reservoir Hill A shul that never left the Old Jewish Neighborhood lives, volunteers, and prays through the recent crisis in Baltimore. The Arts 40 Elliott Horowitz The Great Gaon of Italian Art Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade by Rachel Cohen • Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage edited by Joseph Connors and Louis A. Waldman 45 Steven Pressfield An Al Schwimmer Production Above and Beyond produced by Nancy Spielberg, directed by Roberta Grossman

Exchange 47 Ethan B. Katz & Strange Journey: A Response to Shmuel Trigano Maud S. Mandel 49 Shmuel Trigano The View from Paris: A Rejoinder to Ethan Katz and Maud Mandel

Last word 51 Abraham Socher How the Baby Got Its Philtrum

On the cover: Authentication by Mark Anderson. LETTERS

Otherwise than J Were Arendt and Herzl Wrong About France? sources and think more critically about his evidence. As soon as I started reading Ruth R. Wisse’s review of I carefully read and reread Steven Englund’s essay The point I tried to make in my review is not J: A Novel (“Coming with a Lampoon,” Spring 2015), on the Dreyfus affair (“An Affair as We Don’t Know that Drumont and Barrès are not appalling anti- I put it down to read the novel first. In both Jacobson’s It,” Spring 2015), and, while there is to admire in his Semites—this is very old news—but rather that when earlier The Finkler Question and Kalooki Nights, as I re- review of the new novel about Dreyfus, I felt a you put them into perspective by considering the call them, there is scant awareness by his characters of sense of letdown by his revisionist thesis. Professor whole of the Dreyfus Affair and what energized it, Judaism or the Jewish people; in J this state of affairs Englund says: “Édouard Drumont, the only impor- their importance is far less than is constantly rehearsed reaches its apogee as the name of the religion or the tant French anti-Semite, was certainly a rhetorical in old-fashioned treatments such as Frederick Brown’s. people cannot even be uttered, let alone recalled. force to be reckoned with at home throughout the To repeat: The Dreyfus Affair turned on other I found myself reading from the perspective of years of the Affair, with his incendiary denunciations matters than just “the Jewish Question,” and French an oleh. Jacobson’s world is bleak; the larger world of the ‘big Jews and their accomplices’ who ought to political anti-Semitism was not a major movement is brutish, unmoored, something less than human. be court-martialed and executed.” even in the Third Republic, let alone in Europe. I cit- The Js, those to whom “IT HAPPENED, IF IT HAP- Has Englund not heard of Maurice Barrès, who, ed a good deal of evidence, much of it new, whereas PENED” are merely reflections of those to whom according to Frederick Brown in his important Mr. Arnon’s points are wearily familiar. I strongly they themselves are, literally, not. urge him to read Grégoire Kauffmann’s biography Frankly, Kevern’s decision not to participate in of Drumont, Laurent Joly’s study of the Action Fran- the renewal of the Js just so they could be annihilated çaise, and, above all, Bertrand Joly’s revisiting of the again makes some sense to me. The state of a people political history of the Dreyfus Affair. If he does so, whose self-awareness is merely a reflection of oth- Mr. Arnon will not come to believe that the France of ers is probably not worth sustaining. The answer, it the belle époque loved Jews (though French Jews very seems to me, lies in true self-renewal and national re- much loved France, as German Jews loved the Kai- newal, which, of course, is the Zionist project. Jacob- serreich, and Austrian Jews adored “der alte Kaiser”), son is sardonically funny, internally consistent, and at nor that there were no virulent anti-Semites there, as the end of the day, the frog in increasingly hot water elsewhere. He may, however, come to see that these that he allegorizes. That might be the way he wants it, questions did not drive either the Affair or French his- but to me it is a clarion call to be otherwise. tory to the degree he has been led to believe. Douglas Altabef Rosh Pina, Israel La Juive I am grateful for Mitchell Cohen’s wide-ranging article Internalized Guilt (“Going Under with Klinghoffer,” Spring 2015). How- Clearly a major element in the passion motivating ever, it missed the valuable opportunity to compare Americans to support BDS is the simple frustration Klinghoffer with the 1835 opera La Juive (The Jewess) of having no realistic alternatives to concretely in- by Jacques Fromental Halévy, which had a place in fluence Israeli policies toward the Palestinians (“Cli- book The Embrace of Unreason, said “That Dreyfus the standard repertoire until the ascent of Nazism a mate of Opinion,” Spring 2015). Another element is is guilty, I deduce not from the facts themselves, but century later. Both operas focus on the predicament the internalized guilt people feel about the fact that from his race”? The professor is being led by his re- of an unjustly accused Jewish protagonist faced with we ourselves (pretty much no matter where we now visionist thesis and not by the historical facts when death. In La Juive, Eléazar responds to his sentence call home) are living on lands that were taken from he argues: “But Drumont was a political pariah who by withholding information from his tormentor to indigenous native populations by means of lies, le- was viewed as a corrupt monomaniac. The few doz- achieve symbolic vengeance. For this act Eléazar was gal trickery, brutality, and genocidal policies that ens of secondary and tertiary French anti-Semites often called “the Shylock of Grand Opera,” instead of are historically undeniable. Nothing can be done who trailed after him were largely immature ado- being granted the status of heroic martyr. to change the facts of history, but I suggest that we lescents, a handful of failed artists, some police Though biased against Jews in music, Wagner ad- deal with this guilt by transforming it into righteous spies, and a plethora of accomplished hucksters and mired the score of La Juive and, in fact, quoted it in indignation aimed at what we perceive (rightly or embezzlers. What is remarkable is how this farrago his music. One cannot fail to note the parallel opening wrongly) to be similar instances of unfair treatment. of frauds has mesmerized so many historians who scenes of Siegfried and La Juive, both beginning with Daniel Liechty have taken them for what they said they were.” a rhythmic hammering on a smith’s anvil. It is even Normal, IL Were Renoir and Degas minor painters? These more ironic that Wagner borrowed a theme from two anti-Dreyfussards took out their Jew-hatred this work to portray the anger of the Nordic war god Alvin H. Rosenfeld Responds: on their impressionist colleague Camille Pissarro. Wotan, a character who gained new resonance during Most Americans do not, in fact, support boycotts, From all accounts they made his life miserable with the Nazi era. One doubts Klinghoffer will become part institutional divestment, or sanctions (BDS) against disgusting Jew-baiting. One of the few French paint- of the standard repertoire for a century, but it is chill- Israel. Among those who do, many seem driven by ers to side with Dreyfus was Claude Monet. These ing to think that Jews could still be victimized musi- passions that far surpass normal criticism of Israeli are not quibbles. It is not Hannah Arendt who was cally after all that happened since Wagner. policies. As Professor Mahmood Mamdani of Co- wrong when she argued that the Dreyfus affair was Larry W. Josefovitz lumbia University has said “the Palestinian chal- the time when social anti-Semitism in France en- Beachwood, OH lenge is to persuade the Jewish population of Israel tered the political sphere, and it was not Theodore and the world that, just as in South Africa, the long Herzl who was wrong when he saw in the Affair the Top Dog term security of a Jewish homeland in historic Pales- beginning of the end of Jewish life in Europe. I enjoyed Abraham Socher’s discussion of the latest tine requires the dismantling of the Jewish state . . . Jacob Arnon Saul Bellow books (“Live Wire,” Spring 2015). It Jews can have a homeland in historic Palestine, but via jewishreviewofbooks.com took me back to the times when I saw the great not a state.” Needless to say, the overwhelming ma- man walking to campus with his angled hat and silk jority of Israelis and their friends abroad will not Steven Englund Responds: foulard. Surely, he would have been glad to know of be quick to endorse such eliminationist arguments. I thank Mr. Arnon for taking the time to write, and the continuing high-level attention that is paid him. Nor will they be persuaded by arguments about in- hasten to reassure him I have not only heard of Mau- Still, I wonder. There was a time when novelists digenous peoples: Jews have claimed residence in rice Barrès, but read Frederick Brown’s book. The seemed central to American culture and the fact Israel for a very long time and do not see themselves pair indeed go together, like Tweedles Dum and that we had the top dog or dogs (Bellow, Roth, as alien intruders. Now in its 67th year, Israel is in Dee. Without Brown, Drumont and Barrès would Malamud) seemed central to American Jewry. Is many ways a strong and thriving country, and most presently lose the hold they have on received opin- either the case anymore? Israelis and their many friends abroad feel no need ion; while Brown, without their articles and books to Tilda Oppenheim to apologize for its existence. endlessly reread, would be obliged to look at other Chicago, IL

4 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 FEATURE Israel's Northern Border and the Chaos in Syria: A Symposium

In the four-plus years since the Arab Spring, a great deal has changed, to say the least. Regimes have fallen, alliances have shifted and re-shifted, and new (and terrifying) actors have appeared on the scene. The diplomatic and strategic assumptions of several decades seem to have been upended. Nowhere is this more dramatically apparent than across Israel’s northern border. For much of Israel’s history, Syria was the country’s most formidable foe, but now it is in the midst of a seemingly interminable and shockingly brutal civil war. Indeed, one wonders whether there will be a country called Syria when it all ends, or if it will all end. For the past four years, Israel has managed to avoid getting sucked into the Syrian crisis, but how long will this be possible with Assad’s forces, Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, ISIS, and the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front on the border? And how does the terrible and extraordinary flow of refugees affect the strategic equation in this chaotic new Middle East? Should Israel rethink its current defensive policy and do what it can to topple the evil but increasingly shaky Assad regime? Should it seize the opportunity to deal a fatal blow to what is now the weakest link in the “axis of resistance” of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah? Or should it refrain from action, lest it inadvertently strengthen the hand of the regime’s enemies, who might prove even more dangerous to Israel than the Assads? We asked these questions of three distinguished analysts who have been thinking about the Israeli-Syrian relationship for a long time and who have all also been active, in different ways, in shaping it. Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and served, most recently, as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor in the administration of President George W. Bush. He is the author of Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Itamar Rabinovich was Israel’s ambassador to the United States in the 1990s as well as chief negotiator with Syria between 1993 and 1996. He has written six books, including The View from Damascus: State, Political Community and Foreign Relations in Modern and Contemporary Syria. Major General (res.) Amos Yadlin has had an extraordinary career in the IDF (he was one of the pilots selected to bomb Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981) and served as the head of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate. He is currently the director of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. —The Editors

Bashar al-Assad is slaughtering Sunnis. His re- ground between Assad and his Iranian and Hezbol- The View from the gime’s base is in the Alawite community, only about lah backers, the various jihadi groups affiliated either 12 percent of the population in that 74 percent Sunni with ISIS or al-Qaeda, and a third and weaker group Northern Border country, so he keeps power by sheer brutality. That of rebels the United States supports with an anemic, population imbalance should have led to his defeat almost pathetic train-and-equip program. already, but he is supported by Hezbollah and Iran. Israelis are not, or not yet anyway, very afraid of BY ELLIOTT ABRAMS Hezbollah fighters and Iranian Revolutionary Guards what’s happening in Syria. They are more focused are on the ground in Syria—a Shi’ite expeditionary on Hamas in Gaza, with which they have fought force. Sunnis from around the world have reacted several wars; on the Iranian nuclear program and n early May I stood on Israel’s northern border, by enlisting in the struggle: Assad’s mass murder is the likely (and in their view dangerously inad- chatting with two extremely relaxed observers the best recruiting tool ISIS has. Syria is now a battle- equate) deal between the United States and Iran; (one Canadian soldier and one Finn) from UN- TSO,I the UN’s Truce Supervision Organization. For many years the UN’s Golan observer force has been a relaxing assignment, because the Assads, father and son, chose to keep the border quiet—and keep Syria frozen in unchanging tyranny. No longer: Syria is a graveyard now, with more than 200,000 dead, and a base for jihadis. The humanitarian crisis is greater than most acknowledge: There are four million “registered” refugees, but the true number is certainly larger, and half the Syrian population has now been driven or fled from their homes. This places immense burdens on Jordan and Lebanon: How does a small country handle 1.5 million refugees? Moreover, the sheer number of refugees has demographic and therefore political implications. Lebanon was, just a few years ago, thought to have a Shi’ite majority, and Jordan a Pal- estinian majority. No longer—not if we are counting the people actually living there now. And given the slaughter in Syria they are not going home, because their homes are gone. This humanitarian situation affects Israel, as wounded refugees make it across the border seeking medical help—which they receive. But the numbers are small, and the burden is not great. What Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon visits a military outpost on Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights is great is the risk that Israel now faces because its overlooking the Israeli-Syrian border, February 2015. (Photo by Ariel Hermoni/Ministry of Defense/ northern neighbor has fallen apart. FLASH90.)

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 5 on Hezbollah, Iran’s great ally and proxy, with over directly with Syria and has faced Syrian-supported 100,000 missiles and rockets trained on Israel; and The Enemy of My Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon, it has also, of course on their own internal politics, with Ne- since 1991, conducted round after round of serious tanyahu having just formed a government that has Enemy negotiations with the Assad regimes. Five Israeli only a one-vote margin in the Knesset. Military of- prime ministers have conveyed to Hafez and Bashar ficers are almost laconic in noting that projectiles of al-Assad their hypothetical, conditional willingness various kinds—shells and rockets from the fighting BY ITAMAR RABINOVICH across the border—land in Israel regularly, but appear to be by-products of the Syrian war rather than Keeping Israel out of the fray attacks on the Jewish state. f Syria’s five neighbors, Israel has been the is certainly the wish of the True enough—for now. And if the Islamic State’s least involved in the turmoil that is devour- gains in Iraq and Syria are reversed—by American ing the country and the least affected by it. Assad regime and its patrons, bombing, Shi’ite militias backed by Iran, the Iraqi TurkeyO and Jordan have supported different factions Army, the Kurdish Peshmerga, Syrian rebels, or of the Syrian opposition. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Iran and Hezbollah. the combination of this motley set of forces—the Shi’ite party militia, terrorist organization, and Ira- barbarous organization may never look south. Per- nian proxy, has conducted much of the fighting on to come down from the Golan Heights in return for behalf of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. ISIS, the jihadi a satisfactory peace and security package. Indeed, organization, has assumed control of large swaths of up until the eve of the civil war, Benjamin Netan- Assad’s mass murder is the land in western Iraq and eastern Syria. But Israel has yahu was party to a mediation effort conducted by engaged only in limited skirmishes along the cease- the American diplomat Fred Hof. When the dem- best recruiting tool ISIS has. fire line in the Golan and a few pinprick attacks on onstrations against the Assad regime turned into a weapon systems about to be delivered to Hezbollah. full-fledged rebellion in 2011, Israel had to decide haps and, then again, perhaps not. Perhaps ISIS While Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon have taken in what it preferred: the Syrian regime’s survival or a will survive and thrive in Iraq and Syria, and then millions of Syrian refugees, Israel has opened its rebel victory. start thinking about Al Quds. Perhaps reverses will borders to supply largely unpublicized humanitar- Two schools of thought quickly crystalized: The come, but they will lead ISIS to reinforce its Syrian ian aid to people who remain enemy civilians. first argued that “the devil we know” was prefera- redoubt and seek more recruits and more fame by Keeping Israel out of the fray is certainly the ble to the prospect of an Islamist takeover. The sec- taking on the Jews. wish of the Assad regime and its patrons, Iran and ond, more optimistic school of thought envisioned That’s the new risk up north for Israel. And the Hezbollah, that have, on the whole, been careful not the prospect of significant change for the better old risk remains: the well-equipped and well-trained to provoke the Jewish state into taking strong ac- in Syria and Lebanon and advocated interven- forces of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah’s willing- tion. They know full well that Israel could weaken tion on behalf of the rebels. Netanyahu’s govern- ness to do Iran’s work in Syria, where it has lost by the regime’s air force and armored units enough ment chose the former course. It drew redlines and most estimates over 1,000 men, suggests that it would to expose them to defeat by the opposition. Iran’s strove to impede the transfer of advanced weapon indeed start a war with Israel should the Israelis strike calculus has also been affected by its own nuclear systems to terrorist organizations, first and fore- the Iranian nuclear sites. That would be a major con- ambitions. It no doubt fears that a major clash in most Hezbollah, by carrying out several (officially flict, dwarfing Israel’s effort nine years ago in the Syria or Lebanon could lead to an Israeli attack on unacknowledged) surgical air strikes against such summer of 2006. The price for Lebanon and for Is- its nuclear installations or at least have a detrimental deliveries. It also retaliated against every shot fired rael would be high. I did not find the Israelis quaking effect on its negotiations with the P5+1 nations. across the Syrian-Israeli ceasefire line in the Golan about this. I found them very, very Israeli: If it will Israel, for its part, has looked at the Syrian cri- and initiated limited (also unacknowledged) tacti- come it will come, several generals told me. sis through two lenses. The first is focused on Syria cal cooperation with jihadi groups along that line Much has been written recently about the new itself. While Israel has fought several costly wars to prevent their shared enemy, Hezbollah, from “objective alignment” between Israel and the Sunni states: Jordan, Egypt, and the Gulf monarchies. They all oppose Iran’s growing power, they are all fighting al-Qaeda and ISIS, and they all worry about what they see as a decline in American power and willingness to act. The risk to Israel of a conventional war with an Arab state is next to zero today. Nor are Is- raelis worried greatly about Palestinian terrorism. It continues, but Hamas has something to lose in Gaza and seems not to want another round, while in the West Bank the Palestinian Authority glorifies dead terrorists but opposes new violence. All that would mean a real improvement in Israel’s security situation, were it not that its northern border has moved from quiet to shaky. The forces on the other side of the Syrian border cannot be deterred the way a state, or even Hamas, can be. That they might be killed slip- ping into Israel is not ideal from their perspective, to be sure, but there are plenty of recruits still appearing in the form of Muslim youths from Tunis and Mil- waukee and Lahore and Riyadh and London. And think of the glory in confronting the Jews! It has not happened yet. Those UNTSO officers drank their tea and didn’t even bother to look across the border through their very large binoculars. But when you fly over northern Israel, you see plenty of preparations for the day when the Syrian slaughter gives birth to cross-border attacks. The Israelis ap- Internally displaced Syrians in the Atme camp, along the Turkish border in the northwestern Syrian province pear as relaxed as the UN guys. But they aren’t. of Idlib, March 2013. (Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images.)

6 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 extending its zone of confrontation with Israel. as any that has occurred in our time. How can the has destroyed or removed the bulk of his chemical Netanyahu’s prudence was in tune with the gen- world allow such things to go on? arsenal. In fact, the Syrian armed forces are now so eral conservatism his government displayed in deal- Much like its Western allies, however, and con- decrepit, that if it weren’t for Hezbollah, Iran, Iraqi ing with other matters related to national security. scious of the limits of its power and influence, Israel Shi’ites, and Russia’s support, they would probably It was also, of course, a reflection of what Israel has has so far chosen what is basically a policy of non- have already gone down in defeat. This is a major deduced from its failed attempt in 1982 to shape the intervention in Syria. It fires when fired upon, pro- development as far as Israel is concerned, one that politics of a neighboring Arab country. Of course, vides humanitarian assistance to those crossing the enables it to direct the lion’s share of its military even the optimistic school of thought had to admit border, and prevents the introduction of advanced assets and resources elsewhere. We can now focus that Israel’s options were always limited in the Syr- weapons systems from Syria into Lebanon. This more resources on long-range strike capabilities, ian arena. If Israel wished to support a secular, moderate opposition in Syria (when it seemed that one did exist), any signs of such assistance would have Assad’s departure would deal a serious blow to the been seized upon by the regime as proof that the Iranian-led radical axis, which is currently Israel’s rebellion was not an authentic movement but rather a conspiracy hatched by the United States and Israel. primary strategic concern. ut, of course, the second lens through which Is- Brael views the Syrian crisis is the wider one that policy has proven militarily effective, serving Israel’s missile defense, and cyber-warfare, not to speak of encompasses Israel’s overall interests and place in security over the past few years. non-military goals that have important social and the Middle East. Israel had an understandably dif- For decades, the al-Assads’ Syria was Israel’s economic ramifications. ficult time sizing up the long-term significance of main military threat. With a vast inventory of Next to the Syrian Army, Israel’s most immedi- the Arab Spring in 2010 and 2011. Was it a wave of chemically tipped missiles, well-trained and siz- ate adversary is the terrorist Shi’ite militia Hezbollah. viable democratic reforms that would create a dif- able special forces, and cutting-edge Russian air- Soon after the breakdown of the civil war in Syria, ferent, ultimately more hospitable region, or was it defense systems, Syria dictated much of Israel’s Hezbollah made the strategic choice (with strong Ira- a fleeting moment that would produce pressures on force structure and posture. In pure military terms, nian encouragement, of course) to side with Assad. Israel (from the Obama administration, for one) to the threat is now significantly reduced. The Syrian That decision has had significant impact on its stature take dangerous risks? Soon enough, however, the Army has suffered a great number of losses and both regionally and in Lebanon. Hezbollah’s leader Arab Spring gave way to a somber winter—in Syria defections, and, for several years now, a near total Hassan Nasrallah was once regarded as a heroic leader more than anywhere else. cut-off of training and new conscripts. Assad’s ex- in much of the Arab world, especially after he led the Syria also became the arena for a proxy war be- tensive SCUD missiles inventory has been largely 2006 conflict against Israel. He is now rightfully re- tween Iran and its regional rivals. Israel has a major depleted through attacks on his own people and garded throughout the Sunni Middle East as a senior stake in the outcome of this conflict. It realizes that cities, not Israel. Joint Russian-American action partner in Assad’s bloody massacre of his own people. Assad’s fall could be the prelude to a change in Leb- anon and to a weakening of Hezbollah that would constitute a blow to its most threatening regional . enemy: Iran. If this were to occur, it would be worth the price of an ISIS presence on Israel’s border, un- desirable as that might be. SAVE THE DATE The more aggressive policy recently adopted by Saudi Arabia and the greater degree of coordination Sunday, October 18,2015 among Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar—and their proxies among the rebels—seem to be having an effect. Several victories in the field make it conceiv- able that the Syrian regime might be near defeat. At the same time, Hezbollah has been making a more What Comes Next? aggressive effort to establish itself in southern Syria. JRB Conversations on the Jewish Future If these two trends persist and intensify, they could break the deadlock in the country and confront Is- with rael with new choices. Under such circumstances, Israel’s best bet would be to adhere to the success- Henry Kissinger • Joe Lieberman • Dennis Ross ful policy of the past four years and watch from the sidelines as Saudi Arabia and Turkey defeat Iran in David Wolpe • Elliott Abrams • Ruth R.Wisse their proxy war. Whether that will be possible is another question. Meir Soloveichik • Leora Batnitzky ➤ Date: Sunday, October 18, 2015 ➤ Program: 8:15 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. ➤ Location: Yeshiva University Museum at the Undermining Assad Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th St., NYC Event includes breakfast, lunch, and cocktail reception. BY Amos Yadlin For further information, please e-mail Lori Dorr: [email protected]

ny analysis of the Syrian cataclysm must begin with a somber acknowledgement of the human tragedy that is still unfolding JEWISH REVIEW onA the other side of our border. With over 200,000 OF BOOKS Syrian fatalities already, including some 10,000 children, the Syrian civil war is as ghastly a conflict

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 7 Even within its base of support in Lebanon, even if localized terrorist attacks occur. In addi- Exploring Hezbollah’s decision to side so strongly with Assad tion, if we keep in mind the local interests of small has raised many criticisms, since it seemed to be at militias, tribes, and groups in this vicinity, we can American Jewish Life odds with its longstanding claim to be above all the significantly reduce any incentive they might have “defender” of Lebanon against Israel. The unceasing to attack Israel or facilitate nefarious Iranian activ- flow of Sunni refugees from Syria is fueling sectari- ity. Conventional wisdom aside, the Jewish state is an tensions within Lebanon. Hezbollah has increas- not the primary concern of most residents of Syria, ingly become Lebanon’s guardian against Sunni which is one reason the border has been quiet. jihadi threats and no longer those supposedly ema- Perhaps paradoxically, the collapse of the Syr- nating from Israel. For an Israeli observer, it is hard ian state has reduced the number of threats Israel to assess the strategic significance of this sectarian now has to face on its northern border. The four- rivalry. Perhaps Hezbollah will avoid another major decade-long state of “no war” on the Israeli-Syrian conflict with Israel that could invite massive retalia- border may have seemed peaceful, but Israel often tion, one that would further erode its domestic po- had to pay a high price in Lebanon whenever Syria sition. On the other hand, it could just as well result used Hezbollah to attack it. The apparent quiet on in a Hezbollah decision to regain its raison d’être by the Golan front hid a military balance of deterrence attacking Israel. between two heavily armed foes. Now, it is true, we experience minor provocations, including mortar SIS and the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front fire, rifle rounds, and IEDs, but we have tools with Inow on the other side of our border are really which to counter such threats, which do not place THE HOLOCAUST AVERTED third-order threats. Despite the alarm that these Israel’s strategic assets in jeopardy. An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967 Jeffrey S. Gurock organizations have caused in the West, Israel has Moving forward, Israel will have to choose be- cloth $32.95 a long history of facing the threat of terrorism and tween continuing its status quo policy, which has so far enhanced its security, and taking a more active approach in trying to weaken Assad and his regime. For many years my view has been that Assad must go, even at the cost of a takeover of the Syrian state by radical Sunni organizations. Four years ago, a takeover by more moderate forces such as the Free Syrian Army was also possible. Most importantly, Assad’s departure would deal a serious blow to the Iranian-led radical axis, which is currently Israel’s primary strategic concern. Any Sunni terror organization that could seize control of Syria would find itself responsible for a country and therefore could be deterred JEWISH MAD MEN from taking wild actions against us. Advertising and the Design of the American Jewish Experience Nasrallah himself repeatedly stated that Kerri P. Steinberg Assad’s fall would be a great victory for paper $29.95 Israel and the United States and an ex- istential threat for Hezbollah. Moreover, in this endeavor, Israel shares strong interests with potential allies in the Arab Gulf, which could serve to deepen regional cooperation. Assad’s demise and the collapse of the radical axis is the best strategic outcome Israel could expect. Iran’s support of Assad with tens of billions of dollars is not accidental and represents an understanding in Tehran that its influence in Syria is strategically important. The IDF could likely defeat Assad’s forces overnight, but doing so would risk getting us directly involved in a protract- A peacekeeper of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon ed battle. There are, however, more sub- JEWISH PEOPLEHOOD (UNIFIL) stands by a billboard with Hezbollah chief Hassan tle means of accelerating Assad’s exit that An American Innovation Nasrallah in the southern Lebanese town of Adaysseh, January Noam Pianko Israel and America could promote, such paper $27.95 2015. (Mahmoud Zayyat/AFP/Getty Images.) Key Words in Jewish Studies series as humanitarian corridors, no-fly zones, and targeted air assaults against Assad’s has extensive experience in how to deal with it. air forces. In the short-term, Israel is better off with ISIS’s scare tactics, for example, are hardly likely its enemies fighting one another, rather than focus- to be effective, given the difficulty of penetrating the ing their power against the Jewish state. In the long eNewsletter Sign Up border. Israel’s deep familiarity with Syria and its run, however, it would better serve Israel’s interest Visit our website and sign up for news and intelligence coverage of the country, and especially to team up with the United States, Turkey, and Saudi special offers. the parts that are closest to Israel, make it very hard Arabia to bring Assad’s hold on Syria, and its hor- Receive free email alerts http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu for such terrorist groups to harm Israel strategically, rific civil war, to an end.

8 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 eNewsletter Sign Up Receive free email alerts

transparent Reviews Playing the Fool

BY Dara Horn

commitment and naïve idealism had tied them Purim and Hanukkah. In the Purim version, exem- The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin to a system they could not renounce. Whatever plified by the Persian genocidal decrees in the bibli- by Ala Zuskin Perelman doubts or misgivings they had, they kept to cal book of Esther, as well as by more recent ideolo- Syracuse University Press, 320 pp., $29.95 themselves, and served the Kremlin with the gies like Nazism and today’s many versions of radical required enthusiasm. They were not dissidents. Islam, the regime’s goal is unambiguous: Kill all the Soviet support for Jewish culture came at a very particular, et’s talk about something more cheer- Hanukkah-style price: the extraction of its Judaism, down ful. Have you heard any news about the cholera in Odessa?” to the letters in which it was written. That’s the famous ending of “LSholem Aleichem’s 1904 story “Hodl,” about Tevye They were Jewish martyrs. They were also Jews. In the Hanukkah version, as in the 2nd-century the Dairyman’s daughter who marries a communist Soviet patriots. Stalin repaid their loyalty by B.C.E. Hellenized Seleucid regime that criminalized and follows him into exile in Siberia. The story is a destroying them. all expressions of Judaism, the goal is still to elimi- heartbreaking one, ending with a forced separation nate Jewish civilization. But in the Hanukkah ver- between a Russian-Jewish parent and child. But the This is completely true and also completely unfair. sion, this goal could theoretically be accomplished by agony buried within that final joke transcended lit- The tragedy—even the term seems unjust, with its simply destroying the civilization, while leaving the erature after Sholem Aleichem’s death—when revo- implied blaming of the victim—was not that these warm de-Judaized bodies of its former practitioners lutionaries like Hodl’s husband actually succeeded Soviet-Jewish artists and intellectuals sold their intact. For this reason, the Hanukkah version of anti- in creating a new Russian regime that promised its souls to the devil, though many clearly did. The Semitism—whose appearances range from the Span- Jews lives of integrity, seduced them into compli- ish Inquisition to the Soviet regime—often employs ance, and ultimately ate some of the best of them Jews as its agents. These “converted” Jews openly re- alive. nounce whatever aspects of their Jewish identity are The Soviet-Jewish experience took the form of unacceptable to the relevant regime, proudly declare a psychological horror story, brimming with sus- their loyalty to the ideology of the day, and loudly pense, double-crossing, and twisted self-blame. Its urge other Jews to follow them. These people are used greatest horror came in the undoing of the Jew- as cover to demonstrate the good intentions of the re- ish Antifascist Committee, a board of prominent gime—which of course isn’t anti-Semitic, but merely Soviet-Jewish artists and intellectuals established by requires that its Jews publicly flush thousands of years Joseph Stalin in 1942 to drum up financial support of Jewish civilization down the toilet in exchange for from Jews overseas for the Soviet war effort. Two the prize of not being treated like dirt or murdered. of the more prominent names on the JAC’s roster For a few years. Maybe. were Solomon Mikhoels, the director of the Mos- After many episodes of Purim-style anti- cow State Yiddish Theater, and Benjamin Zuskin, Semitism on the steppes, and especially after the the theater’s leading comic actor. After promoting Holocaust, it is perhaps not surprising that so many these people to the skies during the war, Stalin de- Soviet Jews fell into the trap of not recognizing Ha- cided these loyal Jewish communists were no longer nukkah-style anti-Semitism when it first became useful and charged them all with treason. Mikhoels apparent or of actively serving as the regime’s will- was murdered first, in a hit staged to look like a traf- ing agents. In the wake of indiscriminate massacres fic accident. Nearly all the others, including Zuskin ranging from Khmelnitzky to Petliura to Babi Yar and several renowned Yiddish writers, were execut- (the latter two in their living memory), these people ed by firing squad on August 12, 1952. may well have found a certain appeal in the pros- Just as the regime accused these Jewish artists and pect of not being murdered, regardless of the cost. intellectuals of being too “nationalist” (read: Jew- For those artists who worked in Yiddish, the So- ish), our long hindsight makes it strangely tempting viet Union in its early years had the added attrac- to read this history and accuse them of not being tion of apparently not treating them like dirt. In its “nationalist” enough—that is, of being so foolishly quest to brainwash national minorities in the 1920s committed to the Soviet party line that they were The cover of Zrelishscha (Entertainment), June 1924, and 1930s, the regime offered unprecedented mate- unable to see the writing on the wall and were thus celebrating the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, with rial support to Yiddish culture, paying for Yiddish- gobsmacked by Stalin’s deadly betrayal. Many works Alexander Granovsky as the locomotive and Solomon language schools, theaters, publishing houses, and on this subject have said as much. In Stalin’s Secret Mikhoels as the conductor atop the engine. (Courtesy more, to the extent that there were Yiddish literary Pogrom, the indispensible English translation of of YIVO.) critics who were actually salaried by the Soviet gov- transcripts from the JAC show trial, Russia scholar ernment. This support led the major Yiddish novelist Joshua Rubenstein concludes his lengthy introduc- tragedy, for which no one can be blamed but the rel- Dovid Bergelson to publish his landmark 1926 article tion with the following: evant devil, was that integrity was never an option “Three Centers” about New York, Warsaw, and Mos- in the first place. cow as centers of Yiddish-speaking culture, asking As for the defendants at the trial, it is not clear Of the many varieties of anti-Semitism, or anti- which city offered Yiddish writers the brightest pros- what they believed about the system they each Judaism, that have plagued the Jews over the centu- pects. Bergelson’s unequivocal answer was Moscow, a served. Their lives darkly embodied the tragedy ries, two recurrent general patterns can be identified choice that resulted in his execution in 1952. of Soviet Jewry. A combination of revolutionary by the holidays that celebrate triumphs over them: The reversal of Soviet-Jewish fortunes is occa-

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 9 sionally presented as abrupt and unexpected, as in terrogatee may have spent their time together. Suf- what was lost. And for that one needs to return to the Jewish Museum’s otherwise excellent exhibit on fice it to say that another JAC detainee didn’t make the world of Sholem Aleichem, the author of Benja- the Moscow State Yiddish Theater in 2009, where it through the trial alive.) His three years in Lefor- min Zuskin’s first role on the Yiddish stage, in a play rooms full of beautiful Chagall murals and Yiddish tovo began when he was arrested in 1949 in a hos- fittingly titled It’s a Lie! films terminated suddenly in a dark room featur- pital room, where he was being treated for chronic Benjamin Zuskin’s path to the Yiddish the- ing a film of the funeral of the theater’s murdered insomnia brought on by the murder of his boss and ater and later to the Soviet firing squad began in a director Mikhoels, with a voiceover announcing, career-long acting partner Mikhoels; the secret police shtetl comparable to those immortalized in Sholem “Theater is an ephemeral art.” (I couldn’t make this strapped him to a gurney and carted him to prison in Aleichem’s work, and part of this memoir’s beauty is up.) But the truth is that from the beginning, Soviet his hospital gown while he was still sedated. the attention it lavishes on how the old world Zuskin support for Jewish culture came at a very particular, But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. In order to came from animated his art. Zuskin, a religious Hanukkah-style price: the extraction of its Judaism, truly appreciate the loss here, one needs to know child who was exposed to theater only through down to the letters in which it was written. The re- traveling Yiddish troupes and clowning rela- gime went so far as to create a new, literally anti- tives, experienced that world’s destruction: Semitic Soviet orthography for Yiddish. This in- His native Lithuanian shtetl, Ponievezh, was volved eliminating the alphabet’s variable final con- among the many Jewish towns forcibly evacu- sonants (a mem at the end of a word looks exactly ated during the First World War, catapulting like a mem anywhere else) and making the spelling him and hundreds of thousands of other Jew- of all Semitic-origin words phonetic, so that a word ish refugees into modernity. He landed in a like “Shabbat” (pronounced “Shabbes” in Yiddish), secular secondary school in Penza, a Russian spelled since the Pentateuch as shin-bet-tav (“shin- city with a Yiddish theater presence. In 1920, beys-sav” in Yiddish), was now spelled “shin-alef- the Moscow State Yiddish Theater opened, beys-ayin-somekh.” If the goal here weren’t spelled and by 1921, Zuskin was starring alongside out clearly enough, one can see the process even Mikhoels, the theater’s leading light. more vividly in the repertoire of the government- In the one acting class I ever attended, I sponsored Moscow State Yiddish Theater, which learned only one thing: Acting isn’t about pre- could only present or adapt Yiddish plays that de- tending to be someone you aren’t, but rather nounced traditional Judaism as backward, bourgeois, about emotional communication. Zuskin, corrupt, or even more explicitly—as in the many pro- who not only starred in most theater produc- ductions involving ghosts and graveyard scenes—as tions but also ran the theater’s acting school, literally dead. As its actors would be, soon enough. embodied that concept. His very first audi- Enter Benjamin Zuskin, stage left. tion was a one-man sketch he created, consisting of nothing more than a bumbling old mong the many scholarly tomes on Soviet- tailor threading a needle—without words, AJewish history, Ala Zuskin Perelman’s The costumes, or props. It became so popular that Travels of Benjamin Zuskin, a memoir of the author’s he performed it to entranced crowds for years. father, is a breath of fresh air. Zuskin Perelman, who This physical artistry, beautifully described in now lives in Israel, was only 14 years old when her this memoir, animated his every role. As one father was arrested. But her book—first published critic wrote, “Even the slightest breeze and he in Hebrew and Russian in 2002, and newly available is already air-bound.” in English in a somewhat abridged form—is pain- Zuskin as Senderl and Mikhoels as Benjamin in Travels Zuskin specialized in playing comic fig- stakingly researched in both Russian and Yiddish of Benjamin the Third, 1927. (Courtesy of the Beit ures like the Fool in King Lear—as his daugh- sources, and she grew up completely immersed in Hatfutsot Photo Archive, Tel Aviv, Zuskin Collection.) ter puts it, characters who “are supposed to her father’s world. Her mother was also an actor in the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, and her family lived in the same building as Mikhoels, along with many other important Soviet-Jewish artists. In addition to seeing her parents perform countless times, she also witnessed the destruction of their world: She attended Mikhoels’s state funeral; witnessed the arrest of the Yiddish writer Der Nister, whose apartment was across the hall from hers; and was present when secret police ransacked her home in conjunction with her father’s arrest. We are accustomed by now to reading emotional memoirs of Holocaust survivors or victims written by their children, and, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we are also accustomed to clinical reports of Soviet crimes extracted from archives opened in the past 20 years. But Zuskin Perelman’s book is a rare thing: an emotional recounting, with the benefit of hindsight, of what it was really like to live through the nadir of the Soviet-Jewish nightmare. It’s as close as we can get, anyway. Benjamin Zuskin’s own thoughts on the topic are only available from state interrogations extracted under unknown tortures. (One typical interrogation document from his three years in the notorious Lefortovo Prison announces that that day’s interrogation lasted four hours, but the transcript is only half a page long— Set design by Robert Falk for Travels of Benjamin the Third, 1927. (From the A.A. Bakhrushin State Central leaving to the imagination how interrogator and in- Theatre Museum, Moscow, courtesy of YIVO.)

10 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 make you laugh, but they have an additional dimen- was during this European tour that the theater’s sponsored Jewish enterprise. Zuskin Perelman sion, and they arouse poignant reflections about the famed director Alexander Granovsky defected to beautifully captures this tension as she explains cruelty of the world.” In an autobiographical essay the West—it is worth considering why this per- the badkhn’s role: “He sends a double message: he included in the volume, Zuskin articulates this viv- formance so affected Freud. The production was denies the very existence of the vanishing shadow idly. As he discusses his favorite roles, he explains a zombie story about the horrifying possibility of world, and simultaneously he mocks it, as if it re- that “my heart is captivated particularly by the im- something that is supposed to be dead (here, Jew- ally does exist.” age of the person who is derided and humiliated, ish civilization) coming back to life. In this way, This double message was at the heart of Benja- min Zuskin’s work as a comic Soviet-Yiddish actor, Zuskin's very first audition was a one-man sketch he created, a position that required him to mock the traditional Jewish life he came from while also pretending consisting of nothing more than a bumbling old tailor that his art could exist without it. “The chance to make fun of the shtetl which has become a thing threading a needle—without words, costumes, or props. of the past charmed me,” he claimed early on, but later, according to his daughter, he began to pri- but who loves life, even though he encounters ob- this romantic work became a means of denigrating vately express misgivings. The theater’s decision to stacles placed before him through no fault of his traditional Jewish life without mourning it. That stage King Lear as a way of elevating itself disturbed own.” Unwittingly, Zuskin was pretending to be no fantasy of a culture’s death as something compel- him, suggesting as it did that the Yiddish reper- one but himself. ling and even desirable is not merely reminiscent toire was inferior. “With the sharp sense of belong- The first half of this memoir seems to recount only of Freud’s death-drive, but emblematic of the self- ing to everything Jewish, he was tormented by the triumphs, and students of Yiddish theater will find destructive bargain implicit in the entire Soviet- theater forsaking its expression of this belonging,” it indispensable. The theater’s repertoire in its early his daughter writes. Even so, “no, he could not al- years was largely adapted from classic Yiddish writers low himself to oppose the Soviet regime even in his such as Sholem Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, and Mendele thoughts, the regime that gave him his own theater, Mokher Seforim. The memoir’s title is drawn from but ‘the heart and the wit do not meet.’” Zuskin’s most famous role: Senderl, the Sancho Pan- In Zuskin Perelman’s telling, her father differed za figure in Mendele’s Don Quixote-inspired work from his director, partner, and occasional rival Mik- Masoes Binyomin Hashlishi (Travels of Benjamin the hoels in his complete disinterest in politics. Mik- Third), about a pair of shtetl idiots who set out for hoels was a public figure as well as a performer, and the Land of Israel and wind up walking around the his leadership of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, block. These productions were artistically inventive, while no more voluntary than any public act in a to- brilliantly acted, and played to packed houses both talitarian state, was a role he played with gusto, trav- at home and on tour. Travels of Benjamin the Third, eling to America in 1943 and speaking to thousands in a 1928 review typical of the play’s reception, was of American Jews to raise money for the Red Army. lauded by The New York Times as “one of the most Zuskin, on the other hand, was on the JAC roster, originally conceived and beautifully executed eve- but seems to have continued playing the fool. His nings in the modern theater.” role in the JAC was comparable to a similar post he The acclaim came at a price. Consider one of the held on a Moscow city council, where his contribu- theater’s landmark productions, I.L. Peretz’s surreal- tion was limited to playing chess in the back of the ist masterpiece Bay nakht afn altn mark (At Night in room during meetings. the Old Marketplace), first performed in 1925. Zuskin Zuskin Perelman presents her father as a kind of Perelman accurately describes this dreamlike play as tam, the classical Hebrew term for both a simpleton a “carnival of ghosts” with “a dying city and a grave- and an innocent. It is true that in trial transcripts, yard coming to life.” Those who come back from Zuskin comes out looking better than many of his co- the dead are not only misfits like drunks and pros- Solomon Mikhoels as King Lear, 1935. (Courtesy of defendants by playing dumb instead of pointing fin- titutes, but specific figures from shtetl life—cantors, Natalia Vovsi-Mikhoels and Nina Mikhoels.) gers. But was this ignorance or a wise acceptance of Hasidim, synagogue beadles, the futility of trying to save his skin? As Lear’s Fool and the like. Leading them all says, “They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; is a badkhn, or wedding jester— thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying, and sometimes I divided in this production into am whipp’d for holding my peace.” Reflecting on her two mirror-characters played father’s role as a fool named Pinia in a popular film, by Mikhoels and Zuskin— she writes, “When I imagine the moment when my whose repeated chorus among father heard his death sentence, I see Pinia in close- the living corpses is “The dead up . . . shoulders slumped, despair in his appearance. will rise!” “Within this play I hear the tone that cannot be imitated in his last there was something hidden, line in the film—and perhaps also the last line in his something with an ungrasp- life?—‘I don’t understand anything.’” able depth,” Zuskin Perelman Yet it is clear that Zuskin deeply understood how writes, and then relates how impossible his situation was. In one of the book’s after a performance in Vienna, more disturbing moments, his daughter describes one theatergoer came backstage him rehearsing for one of his landmark roles, that to tell the director that “the play of the comic actor Hotsmakh in Sholem Aleichem’s had shaken him as something Blondzhende shtern (Wandering Stars), a work that went beyond all imagina- whose subject is the Yiddish theater. He had played tion.” The theatergoer was Sig- the role before, but this production was going up in mund Freud. the wake of Mikhoels’ murder. Zuskin was already Zuskin Perelman shares among the hunted, and he knew it: this anecdote only to show the theater’s caliber. But as Benjamin Zuskin as the Fool in King Lear at the Moscow State Yiddish One morning—already after the murder of we contemplate the theater’s Theater, Moscow, Russia, 1935. (Courtesy of the Beit Hatfutsot Photo Mikhoels—I saw my father pacing the room trajectory toward doom—it Archive, Tel Aviv, Zuskin Collection.) and memorizing the words of Hotsmakh’s role.

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 11 Suddenly, in a gesture revealing a hopeless versation was safe. When a visitor from Poland waited in what followed and also no guilt. It is true that no anguish, Father actually threw himself at me, near Zuskin’s apartment building to give him a mes- one can know what Zuskin or any of the other de- hugged me, pressed me to his heart, and together sage from his older daughter Tamara (who was then fendants really believed about the Soviet system they with me, continued to pace the room and to living in Warsaw), Zuskin instructed the man to walk served. It is also true—and far more devastating—that memorize the words of the role. That evening I behind him while speaking to him and then to switch their beliefs were utterly irrelevant. saw the performance … “The doctors say that I directions, so as to avoid notice. When the man asked Writing about Sholem Aleichem’s work, Zuskin need rest, air, and the sea once noted that “Comic and tragic, laughter and tears, . . . For what . . . without these two opposites are woven together and they can- the theater?” [Hotsmakh not be separated.” This idea of laughter-through-tears asks], he winds the scarf has become such a platitude in describing Yiddish around his neck—as culture that we accept it as though it were a feature though it were a noose. of all humor, as though the comic and the tragic were For my father, I think always interwoven, as though it were normal. It isn’t, these words of Hotsmakh of course. But in the theater of Hanukkah-style anti- were like the motif of the Semitism, where absurdity piles upon absurdity until role and—I think—of his even 63 years later we are still debating the degree to own life. which these Jews deserved to be executed by firing squad, it is disturbingly consistent. Describing the charges The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin is not tragic. It is levied against Zuskin and his heartbreaking. It is also deeply moving and even more peers is a degrading exercise, deeply disturbing—particularly today, as one consid- for doing so makes it seem ers how anti-Semitism of both varieties has once again as though these charges are become normal and how, in country after country, worth considering. They are Zuskin in jail, 1948. (From the Central Archive of the Federal Security Jews are once again being called upon to play the fool. not. It is at this point that Ha- Service, Moscow.) But perhaps we can instead talk about something nukkah anti-Semitism trans- more cheerful. Have you heard any news about the formed, as it so easily can, into something closer to Zuskin what he wanted to tell his daughter, Zuskin cholera in Odessa? Purim anti-Semitism. Here this memoir offers us what “approached the guest so closely that there was no thousands of pages of state archives can’t, describing space between them, and whispered in Yiddish, ‘Tell the impending horror of the noose around one’s neck. her that the ground is burning beneath my feet.’” His Dara Horn is a scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish literature Zuskin stopped sleeping, began receiving anonymous arrest under sedation in his hospital gown seems al- and the author of four novels, most recently A Guide for threats, and saw that he was being watched. No con- most merciful by comparison. Yet there was no mercy the Perplexed (W.W. Norton & Company).

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12 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 Paradox or Pluralism?

BY PETER L. BERGER

was “the last Englishman to rule in India.” None- The hegemony of the Indian National Congress The Paradox of Liberation: Secular theless, Nehru understood that Hindu symbolism is now a thing of the past. On the national level, it Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions was important to the core constituency of Congress has been supplanted by the BJP (Bharatiya Janata by Michael Walzer and included the Wheel of Karma on the flag of Party), whose core constituency includes the mem- Yale University Press, 192 pp., $26 the Republic. But the most important symbol was bership of the RSS, a political militia that marches Gandhi himself, walking around in his loincloth, in around in khaki shorts ironically resembling those of the colonial British forces (Walzer quotes the In- dian social critic Ashis Nandy calling them “the il- Walzer’s paradox of liberation, legitimate child of Western colonialism”). The RSS he distinguished political philosopher and if that is what it is, is that and other proponents of Hindutva hold that Hin- public intellectual Michael Walzer has writ- duism is not just a religion among others but the ten many excellent books, and this slim, religion is back. center of a civilization to which all (notably Mus- suggestive volume is no exception. Walzer lims and Christians) should “return.” Tis at heart a man of the left, so he is sympathetic to the the traditional persona of a Hindu holy man, not- This failure of the forces of secular liberation to post-World War II secular revolutions he describes in withstanding the fact that his philosophy of non- “consolidate their achievement and reproduce them- the newly established secular states of India (1947), violence owed more to Tolstoy than to the Vedas. I selves” is another way of putting Walzer’s paradox Israel (1948), and Algeria (1962). More to the point, believe that Nehru’s respect for Gandhi’s moral au- of liberation, but is it really a paradox? Only if one he is dismayed by the religious counter-revolutions thority was genuine, but something he is reported to takes secularity as the norm or thinks, as Nehru, Ben- that have followed them within a generation or two. have said about Gandhi in an apparently unguard- Gurion, and Ben Bella all did, that their respective new But he also has an open mind and is bereft of ideo- ed moment is revealing: “You can’t imagine what it countries had, to quote Nehru, a “tryst with destiny.” logical hang-ups. Walzer is of course aware that there costs to keep Gandhiji in poverty!” Often a joke can illuminate a social reality. Here are important differences among the three (Algeria What is essential is that the Indian National is one told by Indian traditionalists at the expense is, in several respects, an outlier), but he thinks that Congress from its beginnings emphasized that In- of secularists: A skeptical university graduate visits the tension between secularism and a resurgent reli- dia did not just belong to Hindus but to all those a holy man sitting in a yoga position with his eyes gion in each case makes the comparison instructive. who lived in it: Muslims, Christians, Jains, and closed. “I understand you people believe that the Having been trained in the tradition of Max Weber earth is a huge disk supported on and thus internalized a fanatical belief in the value of the back of a divine elephant.” The comparison, I cannot help but agree. holy man continues to sit, saying Walzer’s paradox of liberation, if that is what nothing, keeping his eyes closed, it is, is that religion is back, or that despite the ex- and merely nods. The young man traordinary success of secularizing revolutionaries repeats his derisive question and it never quite went away. He writes: gets the same response. Finally, after the question is repeated a third Initially, at least, this is a success story: the three time the holy man opens his eyes, nations were indeed liberated from foreign looks at the young graduate, and rule. At the same time, however, the states that chants (first in Sanskrit, then in now exist are not the states envisioned by the English): “My Lord Krishna com- original leaders and intellectuals of the national mands me to say to you that in the liberation movements, and the moral/political next three lives you will return as a culture of these states, their inner life, so to bedbug.” Or at least as junior part- speak, is not at all what their founders expected. ner in a parliamentary democracy dominated by religious parties. India, Israel, and Algeria are far more religious than Nehru, Ben-Gurion, or Ben Bella and their revolu- srael declared its independence tionary colleagues ever envisioned. As Walzer writes Iin 1948, about one year after a little later, each of the movements these men led Nehru declared the independence promised victory over foreign oppressors and equal of India. In both cases, it was the standing in the world. To achieve this, “the old ways” Jawaharlal Nehru with Gandhi during a meeting of the All India British colonial rulers who, at the had to be repudiated, “[b]ut the old ways are cher- Congress, Bombay, July 1946. (Photo by Dave Davis, courtesy of the stroke of midnight, took down ished by many of the men and women whose ways Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.) the Union Jack. The founding they are. That is the paradox of liberation.” elites of both countries were very those with weak or no religious affiliations. In the secular and felt little empathy with the piety of or- he Indian National Congress was led by a thor- waning days of the British Raj the Muslim League dinary people. Ben-Gurion was no more an obser- Toughly secularized elite that was essentially had walked out of a pre-independence meeting vant Jew than Nehru was a practicing Hindu. Their tone-deaf to religion in general and to the tradition- called by Congress and proclaimed that Muslims political parties, respectively Labor and Congress, at al Hinduism of most Indians in particular. Nehru needed their own state. This sharp difference in self- first thought that religion would not be a major fac- was its English-speaking, English-educated leader definition between India and what became Pakistan tor in the future. Both also had to cope with large and the first prime minister of the independent state has determined the politics of the subcontinent ever Muslim minorities whom they imagined could be of India. His political ideal was Westminster de- since, at an enormous cost in bloodshed. Inciden- assuaged with citizenship rights. The secularists mocracy and Fabian socialism. As Walzer remarks, tally, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who led the Muslim were surprised when this didn’t work and even more Nehru once told John Kenneth Galbraith that he exodus, was just as secularized as Nehru. surprised when fiercely fundamentalist movements

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 13 within their own communities challenged the is a prerequisite of modern science and technol- theodicy, however audacious or metaphysically im- secularity of the state. Those dramas are not yet ogy: Even a pious Catholic cannot perform surgery probable it may be. It would appear hard to pass on a played out. using Roman canon law. Like the Orthodox airline cultural system or an ideology to the next generation Algerian independence was declared in 1962 af- pilot, she sets about her task “as if God were not giv- without that audacious attempt. ter a conflict between the National Liberation Front en.” This means that a religious tradition in a mod- Of the modern fundamentalists who have (French acronym FLN) and France, fought with ern society must accommodate the fact that some “brought backwardness back” in Israel, India, and equal bloodthirstiness by both sides. French resis- areas of human life must be governed by a secular Algeria Walzer writes that they “claim to embody tance to Algerian independence was especially bit- discourse. Democracy in a pluralist society is also the ancient traditions . . . oldness is their mantra.” ter because Algeria was legally part of metropolitan clearly helped by a degree of separation between the He goes on: France (unlike Morocco and Tunisia, which were state and religion, but it does not require secularism French protectorates), its Arabs defined as French as a governing ideology. And although the claim is false, the sense citizens of Muslim religion. Yet the state to which Perhaps more importantly, I think that Walzer of oldness must account, at least in part, for the liberation movement aspired was established as misses a major reason why secular liberation move- the appeal of their program. They connect a secular republic. A little later the term “Islamic so- ments are very often “religionized.” Secular ideolo- the liberated people to their own past; they cialism” was adopted; as Walzer points out, it was gies do not in the long run satisfy the need of hu- provide a sense of belonging and stability actually Marxism with some decorations from the man beings to give meaning to personal experience, in a rapidly changing world. With the old Qur’an. There is at least some resemblance between especially that of pain and loss. They do not supply imperial oppressors gone, they also provide this and the Zionist use of bits and pieces of Juda- a theodicy in the broad sense given by Max Weber to recognizable, even familiar “others” as objects ism—decorations on a secular ideology that Walzer, an originally theological term for God in the pres- of fear or hate . . . Sometimes the “others” are fairly or not, calls “Jewish kitsch.” ence of suffering and evil. members of a rival religion, sometimes they are Ahmed Ben Bella, the first president of Alge- There is no greater tragedy than losing a child. “Westernizing” leftists, secularists, heretics, and ria, was shaped ideologically by French Marxism. But it appears that there is some comfort to be de- infidels—traitors, it is said, in our midst. The subsequent FLN regime became increasingly authoritarian and “Arabizing,” but, official policy notwithstanding, the Algerian elites, including the leaders of the ruling party, remained addicted to the French language. In the early 1990s the regime was fiercely challenged by an Islamist movement, for whom the Qur’an was certainly much more than decorative. The bloody civil war that ensued was an ironic replication of the earlier one, except this time it was not a French colonial force against an Arab insurrection, but an Arab military against jihad. The conflict simmers on in the aftermath of the (prema- turely named) Arab Spring. The following joke comes from Lebanon, but I think it would be understood in urbane circles in Francophone Algiers as well as Beirut: A woman is in labor in her elegant home (she belongs to a class whose physicians still make house calls). The husband and the doctor sit outside the bedroom, both smoking cigarettes (Gauloises, I imagine). Both are reading French newspapers. Cries of pain are heard from the bedroom, the woman moaning: “Je souffre! Oh mon Dieu, come je souffre! C’est insupportable! David Ben-Gurion with Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres, and Ya’acov Hazan during the opening th Come je souffre!” This goes on and on. The husband session of the 6 Knesset in Jerusalem, November 1965. (Photo by Moshe Pridan, courtesy of the urges the doctor to go in and help his wife. “Too Government Press Office, Israel.) early,” says the doctor, who continues to read his paper. Then a piercing cry comes out of the bedroom: rived if the child dies from fighting for a cause that This is all true at one level, of course, but nothing “Ya-Allah! Ya-Allah!” The doctor says “now!” and the parents believe in, such as the liberation of the Walzer says here or elsewhere seems to really recog- goes into the bedroom. (A similar joke was, not sur- nation. But no such comfort is available if the child nize the transcendent claims, consolatory appeal, or prisingly, told by German Jews with the switch to dies of a disease or in an accident. I remember a sto- experiences provided by the religions under discus- Yiddish indicating the onset of labor.) ry from the early years of the state of Israel, which I sion. Nor does it recognize religion as a context in heard from an Israeli woman in tones of unmistak- which to express the most basic questions about our s there a paradox in the return of these liber- able disapproval. The three-year-old son of a neigh- place in the universe. Pascal described the human Iated societies to religion? And, more generally, bor had drowned in a wading pool. The woman condition as standing at the midpoint between “the does democracy require secularity? Only, it seems who told the story heard someone express sympa- nothing and the infinite,” and religion has been the to me, if one holds a secularist world view and re- thy to the parents, adding: “And this now, when we principal vehicle through which this truly paradoxi- gards secularism as a societal norm. need every Jew in this country!” The narrator in no cal position and our ensuing wonder at the universe Near the beginning of the modern period, the way opposed the national cause, but she knew that have been expressed. Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius spoke of formulating in- such a political statement was inappropriate in the ternational law “etsi Deus non daretur” (as if God face of inconsolable grief. alzer’s central case is Israel. He is both were not given). This is an early instance of a purely In their different ways all the faiths—certainly Wpuzzled and frankly disappointed that its methodological secularism or atheism (Grotius was Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam—have provided theo- founders failed to create a new secular culture a pious Protestant). With this methodological prin- dicies in the broad as well as the narrow sense for a “thick or robust enough to sustain itself” with- ciple in hand, one could formulate international law very long time. I once summed up religion as the au- out the unwanted help of traditionalism. I am not in 17th-century Europe where different states were dacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as quite sure that this is the way the issue should be Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican, and, for being humanly significant. Another way of putting framed. On the one hand, groups that assert their that matter, Russian Orthodox and Ottoman Mus- Walzer’s paradox is that it turns out that we humans superior wisdom and virtue with great pretensions lim. Somewhat analogously, a secular methodology find it very difficult to do without something like of certitude always have a tactical edge over those

14 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 whose convictions are less apodictic and more the idea of a unified Italian state. But the state envis- speaking city of Trieste, became convinced that Italy moderate. On the other, there is, by almost any aged was to be a modern and secular one, very much was the only civilized country in the world. When measure, a robust secular culture in Israel, which is in the line of the French Revolution, whose ideas were Trieste was annexed by Italy after World War I, he very much alive and tempting to those outside it. I carried throughout Europe in the writings of intellec- became an Italian citizen and fervent patriot. don’t know which traffic is larger—that of secular- tuals and on the bayonets of Napoleon’s armies. The Despite Mussolini’s opportunistic concordat ists tempted by the self-assured fundamentalism of Risorgimento had diverse factions, among them the with the Church, the secularism of the Italian state Meah Shearim, or that of haredim seduced by the utopian one led by the charismatic warrior Giuseppe continued under fascism. After World War II there fleshpots and discos of Tel Aviv, which I recently Garibaldi. But the leadership eventually fell into the was no religious counter-revolution. The Christian saw advertised in a European travel magazine as cool hands of Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, an Democrats were merely in favor of Christian val- “the coolest city on the Mediterranean.” aristocrat who ended up in the service of the king of ues, broadly construed. When the Second Vatican Walzer almost seems to think that things might Savoy (later Victor Emmanuel I of Italy). Council liberalized the Church, declaring, among have been, or might still be, otherwise if only the In 1870 Savoy’s elite troops, the Bersaglieri, oc- other things, that religious freedom was a basic hu- cultural program of some early leading Zionist cupied Rome and made it the capital of Italy. The man right, it certainly did not reverse the secular- intellectuals were followed more vigorously: Papal States were incorporated into Italy and Pius ization of Italian society. Neither has the Church’s IX, deprived of even the vestiges of his earthly more recent call for a “new evangelism.” [A]longside the ongoing work of negation, power, declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican. I once believed and propounded a sociological the tradition has to be acknowledged and its A monument to the Bersaglieri was erected show- theory of the inevitability of such secularization, but different parts ingathered, as the poet Bialik ing one of the troopers with the distinctive plumed it now seems to me that the secularization of Europe argued: collected, translated, incorporated into hat and running—Bersaglieri never march, they al- and the educated elites of North America—and, for the culture of the new. Only then can traditional ways run—positioned so that its behind was aimed that matter, New Delhi and Tel Aviv—are exceptions Judaism be pulled apart, its most important directly at the Vatican. rather than the rule. Modern secularity is, if not ex- features—laws and maxims, ceremonies and The Italian state remained secular, even anti- actly a paradox, more in need of explanation than the practices, historical and fictional narratives— clerical, although the Catholic piety of most Italians ashrams of India, the yeshivas of Israel, or the madra- critically appraised. . . . Only then can they continued for a long time. Yet, the state created by sas of Algeria. What I think Walzer has very usefully become the subject of ongoing argument and the soberly Machiavellian Count of Cavour retained pointed us to is not the paradox of resurgent religion negotiation. a utopian, even sacred, flavor in its mission of in- but rather the inevitability of continuing pluralist corporating all Italian-speaking territories. These coexistence between secular and religious spaces in In the end, he thinks that although such engage- territories, most of them in Austro-Hungarian the modern state as well as in individual lives. ment with the tradition should have been under- hands, were called Italia irredenta (unredeemed Ita- taken, it wouldn’t have prevented the resurgence ly). Many of their inhabitants truly believed that be- of the haredim or the rise of religious nationalism. coming citizens of Italy would somehow “redeem” Peter L. Berger is a professor emeritus of sociology at However, he says, in his characteristically mild, them personally. In fact, my maternal grandfather, Boston University. His most recent book is The Many hopeful secularist voice, “it might have improved who was born in Vienna, and worked as a doctor Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion the odds—it might still improve the odds—for the on passenger ships sailing out of the mostly Italian- in a Pluralist Age (De Gruyter). eventual success of Jewish national liberation.” Rarely does a joke reveal a social and religious reality as sharply as this Israeli one: A woman and her young son are riding on a bus speaking Yiddish sometime in the 1950s. A staunch Labor Zionist fellow-passenger is annoyed and scolds her: “You are in Israel now, not in the diaspora. Why don’t you speak Hebrew with your son?” To which she replies: “So that he won’t forget that he is a Jew.” It is this tension that Walzer would like to ameliorate. art hether it is a paradox or not, Walzer has photogr aphy Wfocused our attention on an interesting architecture pattern: successful secular liberation movements modernism that seem—though he claims no “covering law”— judaica & bibles holocaust almost inevitably to be followed by a religious yiddish & hebrew counter-revolution within a generation or two of foreign language the founding of the new state. I want to briefly draw olympic games attention to another case, that of a liberation move- appraisal services ment that was not followed by a religious counter- MISCHLE SHUALIM: DIE FUCHSFABELN... revolution: the Risorgimento of the 19th century, Ben Natronaj, Berekhja; Lazarus Goldschmidt (ed.); Leo Michelson (illustr.) which led to the unification of Italy and, in time, a 1921, Berlin, Erich Reiss Verlag. A collection of 107 fables drawn from modern nation-state. In doing so I am not so much Greek, Jewish, Hindu and Arab narratives changing the subject as expressing my Weberian exploring moral values and the meaning of wisdom. Limited to 750 copies—ours full penchant for the value of comparisons—the more vellum laced in—illustrated with expressive black & white woodcuts. The anthology is the merrier. (It will also take us on a somewhat written in agile rhymed prose and includes circuitous route back to our starting point.) some original stories by the author, who is known as Berachya. A nakdan, translator, Napoleon’s invasion of Italy shattered the jigsaw grammarian, poet, philosopher and ethicist working at the beginning of the puzzle of kingdoms, duchies, sovereign cities, and thirteenth century, he references the the Papal States, and introduced new revolutionary Talmud, adds biblical allusions and gives a Jewish spirit to his interpretations of ideas into the territory. Those who had been running these Fox Fables. Text in Hebrew; Goldschmidt’s introduction and table of the jigsaw puzzle were not amused, and the forces of contents in German. A significant work reaction were powerfully supported by the Roman that greatly expands this distinctive literary genre in the Hebrew language. Catholic Church and the Habsburg monarchy, which Clever and instructive. (31795) $450. between them controlled large chunks of the country. Aesop’s King of the Apes (slightly cropped) The Risorgimento had no coherent ideology beyond

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 15 Do You Want to Know a Secret?

BY AllAn Arkush

look. But I knew that there was a problem with these mind often appears under a veil, and we ought to give Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost articles, and, for that matter, with all of the very good him credit for more than he has expressed.” History of Esoteric Writing books about Leo Strauss that had appeared in recent by Arthur M. Melzer years. Even the best of them—though intended to elzer makes it clear from the beginning of his The University of Chicago Press, 464 pp., $45 be accessible—were the kind of works that only aca- Mbook that philosophical esotericism is some- demics could be expected to plow through. thing he wants to explain rather than justify. As he Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History tells us in his Acknowledgments, he doesn’t even like Writings of Esoteric Writing is about esoteric writing, not Leo it. “My natural taste is for writers who say exactly edited by Kenneth Hart Green Strauss, but Arthur Melzer makes no secret of his in- what they mean and mean exactly what they say. I can The University of Chicago Press, 696 pp., $45 Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and many others employed the tactic Maimonides by Kenneth Hart Green of pretending to be in accord with a traditional outlook while at The University of Chicago Press, 224 pp., $35 the same time subtly undermining it in their writings.

debtedness to Strauss and Straussians. Melzer, a pro- barely tolerate subtlety. If I could have my wish, the wo years ago, I spent a long Monday eve- fessor of political science at Michigan State, fell under whole phenomenon of esoteric writing would simply ning at the airport in Charleston, South their spell at Cornell, at the same time I did. He is disappear.” Melzer doesn’t restrict himself, however, Carolina, waiting, along with some other not a particularly prolific writer, but he is an exceed- to providing esotericism with a decent burial, as these people who had been at my niece’s desti- ingly careful and graceful one, and, after many years opening remarks might suggest. He aims not only to nationT wedding, for the skies to clear. There was so of effort, has produced a truly accessible book about elucidate its nature but to put it in social context and much time to talk that the conversation sometimes esotericism. I wish I could have read aloud from it in to clarify its philosophical underpinnings. turned serious. “Who’s this guy,” asked one of my the Charleston airport, especially from the wonder- One of Melzer’s original contributions to the dis- sister’s friends, “who writes about secret truths? I ful chapter in which Melzer presents “A Beginner’s cussion of his subject is his labeling of “the four forms can’t remember his name.” Guide to Esoteric Reading.” This chapter, as its author of philosophical esotericism” as defensive, protective, “You mean Leo Strauss?” I said. acknowledges, does not scrape deeply beneath the pedagogical, and political. Readers who know even a “Yeah. I read a review of some new books about surface, but it more than suffices to show that esoteric little about Strauss’ Persecution and the Art of Writing him in the Times last week. Where does he come interpretation is by no means an arbitrary process. already have a good idea of the purpose of “defen- from all of a sudden? I majored in philosophy at Co- Faced once again with a conversational challenge sive” esotericism. Because philosophers are by nature lumbia, and I never heard of him before.” like the one I confronted two years ago, I would now free spirits who, as Melzer writes, live in tension “with As a student at Cornell at around the same time be able to make a better start than I did even without the long-standing customs, myths, and prejudices” of that this man had been at Columbia, and having having Melzer’s book in my carry-on luggage. I could their societies, most of them, at least in pre-Enlight- studied with several of Strauss’ students, including just whip out my smartphone, go to www.press.uchi- enment times, resided “in society like alien and sus- Allan Bloom and Werner Dannhauser, I had myself cago.edu/sites/melzer, and start reading from the picious characters: wary, nervous, and with one eye heard a lot about Strauss as an undergraduate—and book’s 100-page electronic appendix of testimonies always on the exit.” In order to stay put and to sur- forever afterward. We now had a subject that could on the part of thinkers throughout the ages that they vive, such people “were forced to develop—as stan- last, I thought, at least as long as the storm. “If you or their predecessors expressed their true beliefs dard equipment for the philosophical way of life—a start saying that a writer said one thing and meant only “between the lines.” Here I’ll cite just two, one protective mask and an art of esoteric speech.” They another, if that’s your principle of interpretation,” from antiquity and one from the more recent past. wrote, in short, with forked pens. my friend complained, reasonably enough, “then Here’s what the 4th-century Constantinople philoso- But philosophers had more on their minds than you can argue that anybody said anything. There’s pher Themistius had to say about Aristotle: their own security; they were also worried about the no way of knowing what anyone meant.” well-being of their potential persecutors. They had I tried to argue otherwise—or not so much to ar- It is characteristic of Aristotle to think that the to protect them and everybody else from danger- gue as to provide a rough sketch of Strauss’ ideas with same arguments are not beneficial for the many ous truths that would threaten their traditional way regard to the tension between rational truth and the and for the philosophers, just as the same drugs of life. Indeed, much of the work “philosophers un- needs of society that impelled so many philosophers and diet are not beneficial for those in the peak dertook to escape persecution they undertook also to express themselves cautiously, even surreptitiously, of health and those profoundly ill, but for some, to avoid harming society.” They believed that they both for their own good and for the good of everyone those drugs and diet are beneficial that are truly should keep “the falseness of the basic myths and else, and how one could probe beneath the surface of healthful, and for others, those that are suited prejudices of their society . . . mostly to themselves a text and figure out what an author really thought. to the present [defective] condition of the body. for the good of society.” This is how Themistius But the Columbia man wasn’t buying any of it. And As a result, he called the latter outsiders and seems to have read Aristotle. since there really wasn’t any great need to close the composed for them undemanding arguments, Unlike defensive or protective esotericism, the deal, I soon stopped trying to sell it. I told him that I but he closed off the other arguments and safely pedagogical variety is concerned not with hiding would mail him some more convincing literature on handed them on to the few. truths but with “the transmission of philosophical the subject, and I eventually did, but when we subse- understanding.” Since “genuine philosophical depth quently met, we never returned to the matter. And listen to Thomas Paine describe Montesquieu and insight cannot simply be written down and What did I send him? Having a lot to choose as someone who went “as far as a writer under a despot- transmitted from one generation to another,” but from, I had picked two brief, lucid, and to my mind ic government could well proceed: and being obliged must be carefully inculcated, in stages, philosophi- convincing accounts of Strauss’ methods and out- to divide himself between principle and prudence, his cal authors often employed techniques that sought

16 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 to regulate the tempo of education. They reaffirmed Enlightenment’s misdirected and overambitious proj- free them from modern prejudices while acquaint- conventional opinions while subtly and surrepti- ect had not only failed but had paved the way to dan- ing them with the genuine Socratic alternative.” tiously indicating their falseness, in the hope that gerous forms of irrationalism. It had left reason vul- Enticed by the prospect of a refuge from histori- their more discerning readers would, at the right nerable to a “double attack” against which he wanted cism, Melzer’s readers may hope to find at the end moment, get the point. to defend it, an assault coming from religious ortho- of his book at least a summary of the specific re- Melzer’s fourth category of esoteric writing dif- doxy, on the one hand, and historicism, on the other. sults to which this alternative path leads. But they fers from the other three, which all began in antiq- In order “to keep things manageable,” Melzer confines will not find any shortcuts, only directions to other uity and are rooted in what he calls “the conflictual his account exclusively to Strauss’ reply to historicism, (Straussian and non-Straussian) books. The clos- view of theory and praxis,” the notion that there is and by extension, its postmodern descendants. est thing that Melzer provides to a nutshell is the an inevitable tension between philosophical rational- Historicism is dangerous because it denies the longest direct quotation from Strauss to be found ism and ordinary social life. Political esotericism, by existence of any standpoint from which it is pos- anywhere in Philosophy Between the Lines: contrast, is an exclusively modern phenomenon. Its sible to judge any one of “an indefinite number of practitioners held that social and political life can and conflicting cultures, metanarratives, or Weltan- Socrates was so far from being committed should be entirely rationalized—but only “cautiously schauungen” to be truer than the others. It leaves its to a specific cosmology that his knowledge and gradually,” in the manner of Montesquieu, as adherents altogether adrift, and, most dangerously, was knowledge of ignorance. Knowledge of described by Thomas Paine. As Melzer puts it, those it isn’t an utterly spurious doctrine. “According to ignorance is not ignorance. It is knowledge of who resorted to this form of writing sought “to pro- Strauss,” Melzer tells us, “there is a relative truth the elusive character of the truth, of the whole mote precisely what protective esotericism exists to to historicism: it is true of modern thought.” But it . . . He held therefore that we are more familiar prevent: the widespread social influence of philo- wasn’t true of classical rationalism, whose greatest with the situation of man as man than with sophical rationalism.” Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and representatives demonstrated their ability to rise the ultimate causes of that situation. We may many others, even the daring editors of the Encyclo- above their various cultural and historical contexts. also say that he viewed man in the light of the pedia—they all employed this tactic of pretending to Strauss’ “recovery of the art of esoteric interpreta- unchangeable ideas, i.e., of the fundamental be in accord with a traditional outlook while at the tion—which shows that the classical philosophers and permanent problems. same time subtly undermining it in their writings. This modern political esotericism was eventu- The Greek answer to our modern crisis, rediscov- ally so successful that it erased the memory of the ered by Strauss, is not a set of definitive answers but a other forms of esotericism altogether: lesson on how to spend one’s life in a realm characterized, as Melzer puts it, by “the persistence, amid the As the Enlightenment experiment moved flux of answers, of the same fundamental questions.” forward, overturning old prejudices and All of this would require much closer consider- superstitions, and (in most places) without ation if I were writing, say, in The Athens Review of dire consequences or social collapse, the whole Books, but I want to turn my attention to what Mel- premise of protective esotericism—that a zer quite conspicuously omits: a serious treatment of healthy society absolutely requires prejudices Strauss’ famous pair of irreconcilable but equally irre- and illusions—came to seem less and less futable alternatives: Athens, representing free inquiry, plausible. The slow march of progress— and Jerusalem, representing loving obedience to a the improvement of the world God who has revealed His will. (The word “Je- through the public dissemination rusalem” does not appear at all in his book.) of truth—slowly buried the Melzer does note that Strauss was strong- conflictual perspective, until people ly attracted to Judaism, but he considers his forgot that it had ever been there. relationship to religion to be “less relevant It came to seem that classical to the present inquiry” than his response to rationalism was always nothing but historicism “since it is not connected to the a nascent form of eighteenth-century phenomenon of esotericism in as intimate rationalism—harmonist, enlightening, and complex a way.” I have my doubts about and progressive. The Enlightenment this, but instead of expressing them I want to image of the philosopher—the public- consider what Melzer says in the footnote to this spirited rationalist bringing light to the sentence in the light of political philosopher Tracy world—came to seem the only one. Strong’s book jacket blurb: “It is necessarily left to And therefore esotericism was never the reader of this excellent work to decide if Melzer anything but the practice of mystics has written an exoteric or esoteric book.” Melzer’s and astrologers. footnote refers us to the work of Kenneth Hart Green, a professor of Jewish studies at the University of To- Melzer sounds rather regretful here— ronto, whose numerous works on Strauss all revolve but why? After all, if he wishes that the Leo Strauss. (Illustration by Mark Anderson.) around the question of Athens and Jerusalem and por- whole phenomenon of esoteric writing tray him as a thinker for whom Jerusalem remained a would simply disappear, what’s so bad about forget- were not so much reflecting their times as hiding very real alternative. The footnote ultimately recom- ting that it ever existed? from them—opened the way to a comprehensive, mends to us, however, “above all, Heinrich Meier’s new understanding of classical thought that was superb Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Prob- n the final, most important, and only truly dif- not only more genuine, in his view, but more able to lem.” Readers who turn to Meier’s book, published Ificult chapter of his book, Melzer argues that the fend off the historicist critique.” more than a decade ago, can see for themselves how price paid by our civilization for relinquishing eso- For Strauss, the goal was not progress but “re- little credence it gives to the idea that Strauss still con- tericism has in fact been extraordinarily high and turn.” This did not mean that it was necessary, as sidered Jerusalem a genuine option. They may then also, more hopefully, that at least some of what has Melzer puts it, that “the Enlightenment somehow wonder whether Melzer, whether he likes esotericism been lost can be regained. After declaring that ev- be undone—a change that he hardly envisioned— or not, has here resorted to protective esotericism, erything he has said earlier in the book about “the in order for historicism to be overturned.” But even pedagogical esotericism, or maybe a little bit of both. historical reality of esoteric philosophical writing . . . if the clock could not really be turned back, modern will continue to stand, unscathed” even if one rejects thinkers can still “liberate themselves from histori- hile Melzer is by no means alone in treating what follows, Melzer makes a case for Leo Strauss. cism so long as they recover the art of esoteric read- WStrauss’ Jewish concerns as inessential to his Strauss, as Melzer portrays him, believed that the ing and engage in patient historical studies that will main message, there are many others who regard his

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 17 writings on the Jews and Judaism as indispensable unredeemed world, and this it represents as a the fundamental truths of Judaism were all true only guides not only to his own efforts to resolve what sort of perennial quarrel in the human heart inasmuch as they were socially useful, then Strauss he called the “theological-political predicament,” and mind. The struggle to bring about a greater was indeed saying something quite explosive. It is from the time of his life in the Weimar Republic amount of harmony . . . is what Maimonides and difficult to distinguish between such a pragmatic ap- onward but to an understanding of the situation of Strauss shared together, however differently this proach to religion and the view that religion rests on modern Jewry in general. Among them, of course, effort may have been performed by each of them. socially necessary falsehoods. If Green means to say is Kenneth Hart Green, who has been writing about that Strauss believed Maimonides considered only Strauss as a Jewish thinker at least since his days as Green thus gives us a Strauss who takes not just some Jewish beliefs to be true in this sense, then it is a graduate student at Brandeis in the 1970s (where Athens but Athens and Jerusalem entirely serious- hard to see why Strauss would have feared that his we first met; it’s a small world). His many publica- ly, and who sees the cure for historicism not in the discovery would rock the foundations of Judaism. tions include an edited collection of Strauss’ later one or the other but in “keeping the two opponents Green, in the end, devotes only a small amount writings on modern Jewish thought, and he is also and competitors for the truth in civilized, even if of attention to Strauss’ letter to Klein, and, no doubt, the editor of a series that includes Michael Zank’s often paradoxical, conversation.” it is safer to rely on what Strauss said and wrote pub- translation and scholarly edition of Strauss’ early This representation of Strauss has a lot to sup- licly than his private musings. The problem is that writings, mostly on matters pertaining to Judaism. port it, but it’s somewhat harder to justify now than Strauss, as Green reminds us, took Glatzer’s warning Now Green has filled in the chronological gap beit was a couple of decades ago, when Green pro- very seriously and decided tween these two collections with a 696-page volume duced his first book. This is due in part to the publi- entitled Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete cation of some of Strauss’ correspondence from the to temper what he judged the quality of dynamite Writings. And he has simultaneously published a late 1930s, when he was in the throes of discover- in what he was conveying. This issued in a companion volume, Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery ing esotericism, mostly through his rereading of presentation of Maimonides’ teaching that of Maimonides, which is also something of a sequel Maimonides in conjunction with the Muslim phi- manifested the artful care, intellectual precision, to the book he published more than 20 years ago, losopher Alfarabi. In a letter to his friend and fellow moral purpose, and skillful literary restraint which Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in historian of philosophy Jacob Klein on February 16, Maimonides himself had exercised, and which he the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss. 1938, he sums up the importance of his research: expressly intended his readers to imitate. In Maimonides, Green tells us, Strauss found a thinker who was neither the strictly orthodox figure This will yield the interesting result that Strauss’ emulation of what Green calls Mai- most previous scholars had considered him to be, a simply historical determination—the monides’ “labyrinthine” style of writing renders his nor, as others have claimed, a covert denier of the determination that Maimonides in his beliefs own essays on Maimonides’ work hard to fathom, to truths of Judaism. Instead, he saw him as “a truly was absolutely no Jew—is of considerable say the least. They are, as Green says, “a perplexing intrepid explorer and searcher for enlightenment in present-day significance: the incompatibility in guide to the perplexities.” I myself have returned to the realm of thought, allowing truth and not dogma principle of philosophy and Judaism. some of the later and more difficult ones quite often or prejudice to guide him.” Maimonides’ forays into over the years and have never come away with the the unknown took him into territory that was too What he has in his hands, Strauss tells Klein, is a sense that I understood them adequately—not even treacherous for most Jews and had to be concealed “bomb,” and if he were to drop it a “great battle” recently, after rereading them with the aid of Green’s from their view by means of esoteric writing, which would result. For, as the scholar Nahum Glatzer had illuminating introductions and notes. I certainly left it visible only to those who were equipped to alerted him, “to pull Maimonides out of Judaism is cannot claim to have understood them well enough cope with it. According to Strauss, Maimonides’ in- to pull out its foundation.” to decide what kind of a Jew he really thought Mai- tention in writing this way “was absolutely and al- Green, of course, is familiar with Strauss’ letter to monides was, at bottom, or, for that matter, what kind ways to educate those bolder souls who need unvar- Klein (as well as every other document even remote- of Jew Strauss himself ultimately disclosed himself to nished instruction and who can ‘handle the truth,’ ly connected with his subject) and quotes it—but he be in his other writings. and simultaneously to reassure those tamer souls does so very cautiously. Glatzer’s warning, he writes, I am not in despair about this. It once did mean who need a safe and pleasant message.” Dangerous did not deter Strauss “from a private willingness to a great deal to me that Strauss spoke of the existence as the unvarnished philosophical truth might have characterize his ‘hunch’ about Maimonides, that he of the omnipotent God as an “irrefutable premise” been to ordinary Jews, however, it was in no sense ‘was a ‘philosopher’ in a far more radical sense than on the basis of which “all biblical miracles and rev- heretical. Strauss believed, Green says, that Mai- is usually assumed . . .’” What Green does not fully elations” can be considered possible. But now, even monides was “always a loyal Jewish thinker and de- reveal in this context is just how radical Strauss then if I were to learn that he was just pretending to be- fender of the Jewish faith.” considered Maimonides to be. Elsewhere, however, lieve this, and that he was just pretending to think What, then, was the nature of the defense of Ju- at a safe remove from his treatment of the letter, he that Maimonides believed it, even, in fact, if someone daism that had to be concealed from the vulgar? does let his readers see the bomb—Strauss’ state- were to prove to me that Maimonides himself was What did Strauss believe Maimonides’ secret teach- ment that Maimonides “in his beliefs was absolutely only feigning piety, and was at bottom “absolutely no ing to be? Green is rather elusive on this subject. no Jew”—and then immediately tries to defuse it. It Jew,” I think I could take that news in stride. If, on the He stresses again and again Strauss’ view of Mai- was as obvious to Strauss as to everyone else that, other hand, Green were to be proved correct, and it monides as someone who pursued the truth “with Green writes, Maimonides could be shown that Maimonides brought together a completely free mind,” but he seems on the whole Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy and revelation, in to maintain that it was only this unbridled activity was evidently a Jew in the beliefs which, enacted the way that he thinks Strauss thinks he did, and that itself, and none of the particular ideas to which it as law, he definitely himself followed, and indeed Strauss followed more or less in Maimonides’ foot- led, that had to be concealed from public view. which he “legislated,” or rather reiterated and steps, I don’t think that it would strengthen my faith And what did “Maimonides’ authentic thought” organized, as law code. But he chose to follow significantly. In fact, even if I knew or thought I knew mean for Strauss? “Maimonides’ perception,” Green them because he had reasons to so choose. Those which Maimonides and which Strauss were the true says, reasons relate to the fact that the truth did not ones, I might still prefer the other ones. always reside in the beliefs; instead, this truth Of one thing, however, I am certain, and Arthur of a deep tension in human beings—between may rather reside in the function which those Melzer has shown it irrefutably: Philosophers from an- philosophic life and the life of the Torah— beliefs performed. This is to say, they serve a true cient times to our own (or at least until the day before resonated very powerfully for Strauss, and or necessary purpose of sustaining Jewish life yesterday) have not always said exactly what they meant, may have shaped much of his thinking, insofar and its specific teachings, just as one may apply and they have not always meant exactly what they said. as his study of Maimonides contributed to those same moral and religious truths to human his own growth and progress as a thinker . . . life or traditions in general. Certainly Strauss was ready to affirm, along Allan Arkush is professor of Judaic studies and history with Maimonides, that this tension cannot be If Green intends here to say that Strauss believed, at at Binghamton University and the senior contributing brought to a complete and total harmony in an least in the late 1930s, that Maimonides thought that editor of the Jewish Review of Books.

18 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 The Life of the Flying Aperçu

BY Alan Mintz

subways and buses each day to continue attending stands out. Trilling was too ambivalent and skeptical Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, a yeshiva on the to be a brilliant teacher, but the moral intelligence Education Lower East Side whose curriculum relied heavily conveyed by the essays in The Liberal Imagination by Morris Dickstein on Talmud taught in Yiddish. Dickstein remained made a strong impression on Dickstein. The book Liveright, 320 pp., $27.95 there throughout high school, although he became increasingly disaffected from Talmud study. At Co- . . . offered a model for criticism in a subtle, lumbia he looked for connections beyond the Ju- personal voice that was neither ponderous nor daism of his parents and found them in courses in academic but was itself a form of literature. hen I was a graduate student in Eng- modern Hebrew at the Seminary College of JTS and Trilling’s seductive conversational style gave me lish at Columbia in the early 1970s, in summers spent as a counselor at Camp Massad, the impression—or was it a carefully crafted my advisor was Steven Marcus, a the exemplar of Hebraist Zionism. And no matter illusion?—of a mind in motion, a man actually marvelous teacher, a renowned au- how fraught and exciting his studies on campus, ev- thinking things through as he weighed the Wthority on Dickens’ fiction and Victorian pornogra- ery Friday he would take the train back to his par- alternatives and probed the issues before him. It phy, and an editor at Partisan Review. He was a pro- ents’ home and serve as the Torah reader for their was not the irreverent voice of the coming era tégé of Lionel Trilling, and like Trilling, he was a New synagogue on Shabbat morning. but the ambivalent, ruminative voice of the more York kid who had attended Columbia as an under- reflective decade that had just passed, a genuinely graduate and emerged many years later with an inde- engaging voice. Despite its Anglo manner, polite finable British accent. During the summer following and reserved, it was also a Jewish voice, rarely my first year in graduate school, I was hit by a car assertive, honeycombed with ambivalence. It while I was hitchhiking in the Bronx trying to make conveyed a sense of the tragic; it spoke not of my way to New England. I showed up late for the fall revolutionary change but of “moral realism.” semester hobbling on crutches. When I told Marcus what happened, he said, “I spent 18 years of my life As an ex-yeshiva student, Dickstein identified trying to get out of the Bronx!” something familiar, even talmudic, in Trilling’s Columbia, where I was also an undergraduate, careful consideration of opposing positions staged oversaw the happy acculturation of young men—there as an inner conversation. It’s unlikely that Trilling were as yet no women—from all ethnic groups dur- himself ever thought that his manner of thinking ing the post-war generations. There was still a speech derived from Jewish sources or Jewish experienc- test when I was there that was aimed at smoothing es, but for Dickstein Trilling’s Jewishness, as slight out uncouth accents, but the main agent of transfor- as it was, created a special place in which to stand mation was the famous Core Curriculum, which re- within the Gentile culture of the English Depart- quired students during their first two years to read the ment. In confronting the cultural turmoil of the great books of the classical and European tradition. sixties and seventies, Dickstein would find himself The courses were small and taught by non-specialists, fortified by what he had absorbed from Trilling: and the texts read in translation. The approach was using the tools of reason to adjudicate the claims thematic rather than scholarly or historical. The class- of unreason. room crackled with ideas, and when students wrote Trilling figured in yet another way. When, as a their papers they were expected to confront the text college junior, Dickstein picked up a copy of Par- head-on without relying on secondary articles or hid- tisan Review for the first time, he discovered that ing behind footnotes. The college encouraged a cul- some of Columbia’s faculty, like Trilling and Mar- ture of confident brilliance that set it far apart from cus, “led a busy and contentious life outside the Dickstein, punting on the Cam, England, June 1964. Columbia’s graduate school, which had been mod- classroom.” That life, as lived in Partisan Review, (Courtesy of the author and Liveright Books.) eled on German universities and had the requisite Commentary, Dissent, and other elite intellectual desiccation and alienation to show for it. magazines of the time, was conducted under rules This heady setting is evoked in an absorbing and ickstein’s story is not a narrative of apostasy different from the pedantry and presumed objec- generous manner in Morris Dickstein’s new memoir Dand rebellion; belief and doctrine play a mi- tivity of academic articles. “For academic work of his “sentimental education” (the book ends in his nor role. Nor is it a tale of the sloughing off of fam- in those days—how times have changed!—you 30th year). Dickstein is a distinguished literary critic ily and ethnic ties; the college student remained donned the mask of impersonality; for magazine and the author of such essential works of cultural genuinely attached to his immediate family and writing you put on the trappings of personality, the criticism as Gates of Eden: American Culture in the the extended clan of his mother’s sisters and their opinionated tone of a living person actually think- Sixties and Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History summer gatherings at a working-class town on ing, speaking, braving discriminations.” Dickstein of the Great Depression. What makes his book stand the northern shore of Long Island. Rather, like his soon started a literary supplement to the Spectator, out from an increasingly cluttered field of academic week bifurcated between Morningside Heights the campus newspaper, which gave him a chance memoirs is the substance of the Jewish identity he and Queens, he sustained a compartmentalized to experiment with boldly speculative writing and brought with him to the Columbia campus. life. Yet while the claims of family remained con- “the flying aperçu.” It gave him a chance as well to Dickstein’s parents were not far removed from stant, Dickstein’s mind was being increasingly ex- look beyond the canonized texts read in class and their Orthodox European origins when they raised posed to the Western tradition, high modernism, to react to avant-garde theater and cinema taking Morris and his sister on the Lower East Side before and the avant-garde, and we wonder how long he place downtown. Only a few years later he him- moving to Queens. The move took place for reasons could have sustained the tension. self became a contributor to Partisan Review—and of economic survival, but the family remained loyal With regard to Dickstein’s undergraduate years then to Commentary newly under the editorship to Jewish observance, and their son took several at Columbia, the looming figure of Lionel Trilling of Norman Podhoretz, another Trilling-influenced

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 19 Columbia undergrad—and thus began what would longed bouts of intestinal discomfort. The ailments stein’s career. On the academic side of the ledger, his become a career-long “double life” as a scholar and followed him abroad and then back home, and no failure to get tenure at Columbia, as painful as it was, a critical essayist. amount of medication and therapy made much of turned out to be a fortunate fall. Landing at Queens a difference. In an oddly related way, he dragged College of the City University of New York, and later raduate school at Yale in the early 1960s was a something else around with him during these years: its Graduate Center, he was able to remain part of Grude awakening to the realities of the profes- his persistent observance of kashrut. Anyone who the scene of the New York intellectuals and to extri- sional study of English. There were fewer Jews and spent time in England before the advent of vegetar- cate himself from the constraints of being a scholar even less Jewish sensibility, though he was mentored ian cooking knows how truly exasperating it was of English romanticism. “I was,” he writes, “instinc- by a young Harold Bloom, whom he describes as to navigate one’s way in a society that seemed to tively drawn to what Lionel Trilling called ‘the bloody “the definition of a luftmensch, eloquently aloft in crossroads’ where art and politics meet.” a cloud of his own knowing.” With continental lit- On the Jewish side of the ledger, Dickstein seems erary theory still just massing on the horizon, the After the crackle of the to have come to the conviction that the love of his study of English literature at Yale was strung be- Columbia classroom and family, and his sense of himself as a Jew, was not de- tween traditional scholarship and the delicate textu- pendent on his continued observance of rituals he al procedures of the New Criticism. After the crackle the trafficking in big ideas, did not believe in. Perhaps if he had come of age in of the Columbia classroom and the trafficking in big the academy a decade later when the field of Jew- ideas, Dickstein felt constrained and isolated in New Dickstein felt constrained ish studies was firmly established, he might have felt Haven. He coped with his alienation by establishing the tug to turn his energies in that direction. And, connections outside the inward-looking academic and isolated in New Haven. indeed, he has taken the American Jewish writers colony. He began a love affair with a young woman as part of his professional beat, and as a working he would eventually marry; he began writing for conspire to add lard to every foodstuff imaginable, intellectual he has continually responded to devel- Partisan Review; and, following in Podhoretz’s foot- including ice cream. Dickstein adhered to kashrut opments in Israeli literature, especially in the pages steps, he spent a year at Clare College in Cambridge even as his intellectual and social world moved fur- of The Times Literary Supplement. His main intel- University, where he studied with the great critic ther and further away from the religious and ethnic lectual energies, however, have been aimed at un- F. R. Leavis. When he returned to Yale, he managed matrix of his parents. derstanding American culture, especially the Great to get a dissertation on Keats written in time to be Something had to give. Repatriated to Columbia Depression that shaped his parents’ world and the offered the best job imaginable: returning to Co- and married with a baby, Dickstein started five-days- turbulent 1960s that shaped his own. lumbia College to teach English. a-week psychoanalysis and began to sort things out. Yet in the midst of all this energetic good fortune, But, in a somewhat frustrating way, Why Not Say Dickstein suffered from a variety of unexplained What Happened comes to a close before the results of Alan Mintz teaches Hebrew literature at The Jewish physical symptoms. He experienced sudden panic that wisdom can be spelled out. The reader is left to Theological Seminary. He is currently working on a attacks that laid him low, and he was subject to pro- make inferences from the subsequent shape of Dick- study of the late S.Y. Agnon.

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arshav is often thought of as a formalist, element of interpretive performance in the reading Three Thousand Years of Hebrew Versification: Hand the disciples he brought with him from of poetry, even when it is read silently, which varies Essays in Comparative Prosody Jerusalem in the mid-1960s when he created the from one performer to the next and is not strictly by Benjamin Harshav influential Department of Poetics and Compara- bound to the prosodic grid. Yale University Press, 376 pp., $75 tive Literature at Tel Aviv University certainly His is a flexible formalism, nicely attuned to the Harshav’s rigorous attention to poetry’s formal units is repeatedly colored by his understanding enjamin Harshav, the brilliant scholar of Hebrew, Yiddish, and comparative lit- that form in poetry is not a mechanical matter. erature, died on April 23 at the age of 86. Those of us who knew him as a friend will were formalists, but his own approach to literary unpredictable character of poetry itself. That flex- missB him keenly, and his loss will be felt in broader analysis was always more nuanced. It is true that a ibility was evident in his long 1972 article for the circles because there was no one quite like him in lit- large part of the present volume involves intricate Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Prosody, Hebrew,” which erary studies. His lifelong engagement in the forms technical analysis—a great deal of it is not for the was hailed as a classic when it appeared and now of poetry has been a unique—and uniquely valu- casual reader—employing diagrams, statistical constitutes the nucleus of the present book’s ac- able—project. The term “comparative” in the sub- tables, counts of syllables and stresses per line, and count of Hebrew poetry. His discussion of bibli- title of this new book deserves special emphasis. In so on. But this rigorous attention to poetry’s formal cal poetic parallelism here is exemplary. Harshav’s fact, Three Thousand Years of Hebrew Versification is units is repeatedly colored by Harshav’s understand- example here is the Song of Moses, which begins a somewhat misleading title, since half of the book “Give-ear, O-ye heavens, and-I-will-speak; and- is devoted to Yiddish poetry. But the importance of hear, O-earth, the-words-of-my-mouth” (Deut. Harshav’s last book extends considerably beyond 31: 1–2). Though such semantic parallelism was both Hebrew and Yiddish poetry. Its opening essays already identified in the 18th century as the basis of are titled “Basic Aspects of Meter and Rhythm” and biblical verse, the many ostensible exceptions led “Do Sounds Have Meaning?” and it is informed by to a long line of confusions, some analysts rejecting a powerful theory of how poetry works. parallelism altogether as an organizing principle, Hebrew and Yiddish are extraordinarily well- some promoting questionable theories in which suited to the perspective of comparative literature; syllable count, syntactic units, even purported as Harshav writes, their literatures are “compara- musical features were put forth as the basis of the tive literatures par excellence.” Hebrew poetry poetic system. Harshav, by contrast, provides an has creatively adopted a rich variety of poetic sys- elegant and sensibly flexible account of how paral- tems in the course of three millennia, from Syro- lelism works in biblical poetry. There are, he pro- Canaanite parallelistic verse in the biblical period poses, three discrete elements that may be parallel to the improbable yet spectacularly successful between the two halves of a line: meaning, syntax, embrace of Arabic quantitative verse (improb- and the number of accents. In some lines, all three able since Hebrew vowels do not, strictly speak- elements will converge; in others, only one or two Benjamin Harshav, March 18, 2013. (Courtesy of ing, have quantity) and monorhymes in medieval will appear. Biblical scholars, alas, have taken little the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Andalusia to syllabic verse in early modern Italy, note of Harshav’s refinement of the idea of poetic Project.) accentual-syllabic verse in Eastern Europe, and parallelism because, as they are not, by and large, free verse in the era of modernism. Yiddish po- readers of poetry, they are also definitely not read- etry, though a mere seven centuries old, exhibits, ing that poetic form is not a mechanical matter. Most ers of the Encyclopaedia Judaica. as Harshav shows in instructive detail, a similar discussions of prosody view it as providing a fixed evolving interaction with surrounding literatures quantifiable grid of rhythm, stresses, and rhyme. hree Thousand Years of Hebrew Versification: and the sound of their poetry. Harshav persuasively argues that such views do not TEssays in Comparative Prosody includes many Born in Vilna in 1928, Harshav’s native language adequately explain the way we in fact read poetry: subtle, close readings of Hebrew and Yiddish po- was Yiddish, but he was also exposed to Hebrew ems. It also provides finely precise accounts of dif- well before his immigration to Israel in 1948. When The meter lies in the base of the poetic text; it ferent poetic systems that are sometimes almost the Nazis invaded Lithuania in 1941, his family fled is the infrastructure of any rhythmical reading. startling in their analytic power, as, for example, to Russia, and so his schooling was then in Rus- But the actual rhythmical pattern is woven his mathematically rigorous description of the persian, including a year of university studies. To these out of the irregularities that permeate the mutations of quantitative meters in medieval He- languages he added German, English (his principal whole body of the verse. The regular meter brew poetry. Prosody is a subject that has attracted professional language after Hebrew), French, and is the symmetrical warp, and the free local assiduous but often-pedestrian minds. Harshav was some Italian; given his place of birth, he must have configurations make up the colorful woof. certainly assiduous, but there was nothing pedestri- been able to negotiate Lithuanian and Polish. He an about him. The last time I visited Irving Howe, once remarked to me that, knowing so many lan- And, just a little further on in this essay on meter just a few weeks before his death in 1993, Harshav’s guages, he felt there was none that was entirely his and rhythm, he notes, “A text is said to have a meter name came up. He surprised me, for he was scarcely own, but, in fact, he was a master of both Hebrew when the metrical matrix can be read in that me- a man given to effusive praise, when he said, “Of all and Yiddish, and he had the rare linguistic resources ter. However, for expressive purposes we may not the people I know, the one I would be most inclined to deal authoritatively with the broad international read it metrically.” Though Harshav does not use the to call a genius is Benjamin.” As Harshav went on to sweep of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry. word, I think what he is saying is that there is an do things one would scarcely have predicted when

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 21 he published his precocious first essay on Yiddish a large bilingual anthology of American-Yiddish the revival of Hebrew, it begins with a 75-page es- free verse (reprinted in this volume) in 1953, Howe’s poetry. They had been spending the year in Ber- say on Jewish modernity, what Harshav calls “the description was increasingly justified. lin at the Institute for Advanced Studies there, and modern Jewish revolution.” He was not trained as a Where, then, did Harshav’s intellectual enter- then they were obliged to stay a second year be- historian, but scholars in the field might well envy prise go beyond formalism? It was actuated by a cause health problems prevented her from travel- the conceptual clarity, the command of minute passionate and creative engagement with literature ing. Harshav had begun to write an introduction detail, and the intellectual vigor of this overview that was not always shared by his Tel Aviv disciples. to the anthology, lacking a good deal of the rele- of a watershed century of Jewish history. Jews in He began writing poetry in Yiddish in his mid-teens vant bibliographical resources in Berlin and hence this period were renegotiating the basic terms of under the pseudonym H. Binyomin, and those more competent than I to judge the Yiddish po- The last time I visited Irving Howe, he said, “Of all the ems say they are extraordinary. Later, using another pseudonym, Gabi Daniel, he published Hebrew po- people I know, the one I would be most inclined to call etry of a high order of formal complexity with often challenging thematic content. (A 900-page edition a genius is Benjamin.” of his poems in both languages, with facing Hebrew translations of the Yiddish, is scheduled for publica- utilizing his own formidable mental storehouse Jewish existence, and Harshav keeps in clear view tion in Israel in the coming months.) of knowledge. The introduction grew and grew, the multiple and divergent directions in which this In subtle ways, the artistic presence of Daniel/Bin- eventually becoming an independent book, The renegotiation took place. yomin makes itself intermittently felt in the scholarly Meaning of Yiddish, which proved to be a remark- A small but telling instance in this account is taxonomies of Harshav. Most of this last book of his is able general description of the distinctive nature his shrewd identification of 1897 as a major point devoted to what one would have to call dry analysis, of departure toward different ideological and yet there are moments when the formal analysis flows geographical horizons. In 1897 Herzl founded into an illumination of the experiential power of the the World Zionist Organization in Basel; the poetry. Thus, in discussing a prosodic example from Bund came on the scene in Vilna; the Yiddish the work of the American-Yiddish poet H. Leivick, daily Forverts began publication in New York; Harshav, after presenting the text of the poem in Yid- the major Hebrew literary journal Ha-Shiloah dish, in transliteration, and then in translation, shows was inaugurated in Odessa; Simon Dubnov, the what its formal patterns express. The poem’s last four intellectual architect of Jewish Autonomism, lines read: published the first of his Letters on Old and New Judaism; and, Harshav adds, in this same year Dine finger tsien zikh nokh diner, Sigmund Freud joined the Vienna chapter of B’nei B’rith. “Thus,” he summarizes, “an entire Dine finger frirn oyf gefroyrene felder— generation—almost sixteen years—passed from the shock of [the waves of pogroms in] 1881– vayse betn—vi gefroyrene felder— 1882 to the formation of political and institutional instruments in 1897.” bloye finger oyf gefroyrene felder. In retrospect, Harshav’s publishing begins with a slow but precious rivulet that lasts a quar- (Thin fingers grow thinner, / Thin fingers freeze ter of a century before becoming a torrent for in freezing fields— / another quarter-century. At first, he had a certain reputation for not finishing things. He did White beds—like freezing fields— / Blue fingers not complete the Yale dissertation that he was in freezing fields.) working on under the direction of René Wellek, the leading comparative literature scholar of that Harshav observes: generation. And although he had developed the principles of a general theory of literature early The last sentences, emphasized here, are on and expounded it in the classroom, the big perhaps the most powerful expression of sexual book on theory never appeared (he was still starvation in Yiddish poetry. The alliterative working on it in his last years). He did publish spell of f throughout the poem (25 f’s), three advance statements of the large theoretical repetitions, symbolically detached images—the synthesis, two books in Hebrew (both in 2000) unsaid wants to develop and receives a new, and Explorations in Poetics (2007), and many of unsaid symbol: a mystic mood results. The lofty his individual essays were seminal. He was in- tone is due to the high syllable-stress ratio (on volved, moreover, in a flurry of other activities. average 3:4). A wholeness of strophe (or rather, Besides creating the department in Tel Aviv, in of a free line-group) is thus also achieved. the late 1960s he founded a Hebrew journal, Ha-Sifrut, which raised the critical discussion A hallmark of Harshav’s approach to poetry is the of literature in Israel to a whole new level. In way he here links mystic moods and sexual starva- the 1970s, he inaugurated an English-language tion with a mathematical ratio between syllable and journal, Poetics Today, which is still published. stress. Poetry as he sees it is a probing representa- The Introduction into the Jewish Theatre by Marc Chagall, A short monograph on the expansive rhythms tion of emotion and human dilemmas, but it is a 1920, from the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery, in the Hebrew poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg ap- representation realized through the formal resourc- Moscow. (Art Resource, New York, © 2015 Artist Rights peared in 1978. And he produced numerous Society, New York.) es of verse, through the patterning of sound and the anthologies in Hebrew and English as well as working with and against the prosodic grid. one translation after another—from German of Yiddish as a language and of how it reflected its and Yiddish poetry into Hebrew, from Yiddish and rom the early 1990s, Harshav began to address cultural setting. It was followed in 1993 by what Hebrew into English (these in collaboration with Flarge questions of cultural history. This turn may be regarded as a companion volume on He- Barbara Harshav). began almost accidentally. He and his wife Barbara brew, Language in Time of Revolution. Though it The turning point, however, came with the two Harshav, a well-known translator, were completing is chiefly devoted to a beautifully lucid account of books he began in Berlin, The Meaning of Yiddish

22 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 and Language in Time of Revolution. Whatever bar- Roth. Harshav went on to produce four books on scholarship and theory, he had no interest in the riers of perfectionism and distraction he had faced Chagall that were both art-critical and biographi- changing hemlines of academic fashion. were now broken. America may have also played cal. A few years ago, the distinguished art critic Instead, he marked out his own conception of a role. He had moved from Tel Aviv to a chair in Jed Perl pronounced Harshav our pre-eminent au- form and expression in literature very early in his comparative literature at Yale in 1986, perhaps out thority on Chagall. All this from a writer who had career and followed it through in his generalizing of some desire to be on a bigger stage and surely out been often identified primarily as an expert on the articles and in his studies of individual poets. One of a need to free himself from the dizzying round formal structures of poetry. regrets that it will not issue in the big book of theory of institutional and editorial obligations in which Benjamin Harshav really was an anomaly in the on which he long meditated. What ultimately drives he had become entangled in Tel Aviv. (It was with academic world. His brilliance alone would have the best work on literature and on other kinds of ar- this move, incidentally, that he decided to change made him so, since true brilliance is always a rare tistic expression is a love of the beauty and complex- his family name from Hrushovski to Harshav for commodity, and there is good reason to suspect ity that are realized through them. (Such love has the benefit of Americans; Israelis, in any case, had that in recent decades it has become even rarer in also been in short supply in departments of literary never been able to pronounce the hr properly.) At literature departments as the best and the bright- studies over the past several decades.) Harshav, as Yale he no longer engaged in institution-building, est, out of understandable considerations of career his new book shows from beginning to end, was a and after the breakthrough in Berlin he produced and intellectual climate, have migrated elsewhere. dedicated analyst of formal structures and technical a steady stream of work, both new books and the When Harshav moved from Tel Aviv to New Haven procedures. But underlying this passion for analysis assembling and revising of his early writings, as well in 1986, the so-called School of Yale had dominated was a passion for art, manifested in his own poetry, the many translations and anthologies. American literary theory for well over a decade. Al- in his translations, in his anthologies, in his work though Harshav had social relations with the mem- on Chagall, and even, if one looks carefully, in the et another turning point presented itself in bers of this group, he never became part of it. In fact, many close readings of poems incorporated in his Ythe early 1990s. The downtown branch of the the only Yale faculty person with an intellectual pro- investigations of prosody. Guggenheim Museum was planning an exhibition file somewhat akin to his was the late John Holland- For more than six decades, Benjamin Har- in 1993 of the spectacular murals that Chagall had er, who was both a fine poet and a superb scholar of shav instructed readers in the operations of poetic painted for the Yiddish Art Theater in Moscow in Renaissance poetry. Harshav, with his commitment technique, but he was always mindful of the subtle 1921. Knowing of his love of modern art together to conceptual rigor and clarity, had no patience for and profound articulation of human experience it with his knowledge of Russian and Yiddish, the Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Althusser, and the other served. Three Thousand Years of Hebrew Versifica- museum sent Harshav to Moscow to examine the French masters of obfuscation who fascinated his tion is a vivid reminder of the precious legacy he has newly accessible Chagall archives. On his return, Yale colleagues (though not, it should be said, the left us. Harshav produced the main catalogue essay, a bril- aggressively idiosyncratic Harold Bloom). Having liant consideration of Chagall’s relation to vernac- absorbed the work of Roman Jakobson—to whose ular Jewish culture and to European modernism memory Three Thousand Years of Hebrew Versifi- Robert Alter’s latest book is Strong as Death Is Love: The and a broad exposition of what he called “Jewish cation is dedicated—and the Russian Formalists, Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther, Jonah, and Daniel (W.W. discourse” from Sholem Aleichem to Bellow and as well as a very wide variety of European literary Norton).

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Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 23 SPONSORED CONTENT A Dazzling Debut Novel About Love, Loss, and the Courage It Takes to Begin Anew Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope

Afghanistan. UN assembly and the kibbutz din- from the four corners of the earth . . . watched her with a despondent face. No. ing hall. France had Arab colonies, Ziva gazed up at Dov. “God had Panting, she said, “Where have Argentina. and they still voted yes. Next Greece nothing to do with this.” you been?” Abstain. voted no, and everyone quieted down Dov took her face into his hands. He shrugged, still leaning on the again and remained quiet until it “I know. It was all us.” wall, hands in his pockets. o encourage communal listening, was announced: The resolution of the Ziva smiled. “And maybe a few “Franz! What’s the matter with Tthe kibbutz had only the one ra- partition for Palestine is adopted by others.” you? Where have you been?” He dio, and its reception was good on that thirty-three votes, thirteen against, ten Dov lifted her, and she laughed as smiled, sadly, then nodded his head unseasonably mild and cloudless No- abstentions. he spun them around. When he re- as if agreeing with one of his own vember night, so good Ziva could close The dining hall burst into chaos. turned her to the ground, they joined thoughts. “I’ve been so stupid. I actu- her eyes and imagine that she stood in People rushed into one another’s the others singing and marching out ally thought maybe my yearning, my the grand hall in Flushing Meadows, arms, jumped, shouted, sobbed, of the dining hall. Ziva sang as loud as little personal yearning, could com- New York, that there weren’t ten thou- climbed on top of the tables, broke she could: Our hope is not yet lost. To pete with this.” sand miles between Palestine and the into song. Some stood, too shocked to be a free people in our own land. “Franz, I don’t understand you. strangers deciding its fate. move, hands in front of their mouths Ziva glanced around for Franz. The world could be bursting into Only the one yes from the United or pressed against their chests. Friends American Danny grabbed her hand flames, and you sing and dance like States and the ten noes from the Mus- and pulled her into the Fred Astaire, and now here we have lim nations were certainties; every dancing. The hora drew the first good news of the century, other country was a question mark. her along, and she sang maybe the first good news our people They needed two-thirds to vote yes and smiled and returned have had in two thousand years, and for there to be a Jewish state, and that hurrahs while scanning you stand there with a long face.” seemed impossible to the kibbutzniks for her secret lover of the “Exactly. Two thousand years of and concentration camp survivors yearning. It’s stupendous. Truly.” clustered around the dining hall ra- “Why are you being sarcastic?” dio. They had long ago come to expect “Because, now I have no chance.” the rest of the human race to either “No chance of what?” turn their backs on them or actively He looked off to the side. “No seek their destruction. chance of having you come to Amer- ica with me.” Costa Rica. Yes. Cuba. No. Safekeeping is Jessamyn Hope's debut Could the Jews soon have a country novel. Her fiction and memoirs have that could vote like this? Ziva hunched, appeared in Ploughshares, Five Points, holding her ear as close to the speaker Colorado Review, Descant, and PRISM as she could without blocking it. Her international, among other literary maga- husband, Dov, stood behind her, hand last two years. Where zines. She was the Susannah McCorkle on her shoulder, grip tightening every could he be? The more she Scholar in Fiction at the 2012 Sewanee time a country announced its deci- searched for Franz, the Writers Conference and has an MFA from sion. When a delegate said yes, they angrier she became, not at Sarah Lawrence College. Originally from all looked to one another in excite- Safekeeping and Jessamyn Hope, above. him so much as at herself. Montreal, Hope lived in Israel before ment; when the answer was no or ab- Here she was in the mid- moving to New York City. stain, Ziva didn’t know what the others dle of a historical moment, did, because she remained still, head clasped arms, saying, I can’t believe it! the climax to one of humanity’s most bowed, waiting for the next vote. It was Can you believe it? If only my father epic stories, a story of literally biblical all happening in a matter of minutes, were alive to see this! My wife, my sis- dimensions, and what was she doing? On Sale June 9 but to Ziva it felt as if they’d had their ter, my little boy. Being distracted by her own sordid ears pressed against that speaker for Ziva and Dov hugged each other, little side story. two thousand years. tightly, as if to squeeze out the disbe- It would be two hours before she lief. Beside them a survivor, a former spied Franz leaning against the new Read the first chapter for free at France– yeshiva bocher, read aloud from the medical clinic, hands in his trouser www.FigTreeBooks.net Bible: In that day . . . the LORD shall pockets. When he caught sight of her Only when France announced set his hand . . . recover the remnant of pushing through the crowd toward Follow us @FigTreeBks yes did a hubbub sweep through the his people . . . the outcasts of Israel . . . him, he didn’t wave, didn’t move, only Fanny and Hilde

BY Deborah hertz

nomic services, the salon women provided cultural Berlin for Vienna at 18 in 1776, after her arranged Fanny von Arnstein: Daughter of the ones that were rarely available to rulers and other marriage to Nathan Arnstein, a wealthy banker Enlightenment nobles in the stuffy environs of aristocratic society. there. Unlike at least one of her siblings and many of by Hilde Spiel, translated by Christine Shuttleworth But would their performance of such roles enable her cousins, nieces, nephews, and intimate friends, New Vessel Press, 369 pp., $18.99 them to receive the sort of acceptance they craved she remained at least nominally Jewish. Several of from their prestigious guests? Would they fight for the younger salon women in Berlin rejected their the civic emancipation of all their fellow Jews? And first Jewish husbands and proceeded, boldly and

n April of 1784, Fanny and Nathan von If Court Jews provided economic services, the salon women Arnstein of Vienna hosted a concert that attracted an impressive number of “princes, provided cultural ones that were rarely available to rulers counts and barons of ancient title,” including and nobles in the stuffy environs of aristocratic society. Isome “brand-new barons,” as well as people of lesser stature, such as “agents, doctors, bankers and mer- chants.” The conductor was none other than Wolf- what kind of Jews would they be? Among the Jewish notoriously, to convert and marry Christians. This gang Amadeus Mozart. He was then 28, trying to salonnières, we see many ambitious egotists who were was not Fanny’s way; she remained married to Na- support his growing family in style by performing ready to shut the door of acceptance behind them, than, a man who lacked her mastery of contempo- his own work in private concerts, rather than suf- whatever that meant for poorer, less-acculturated rary culture and the social graces, until her death fering the indignities that went along with the pa- Jews. For those at the pinnacle, such as Fanny and at 59 in 1818, though her attachment to him does tronage of emperors and princes. If any truly grand Nathan von Arnstein, being insulted behind their not seem to have been deep. personages wanted to listen to Mozart’s music that backs by those who enjoyed their hospitality may She was something of a supporter of the modern- afternoon, they would have to do so in the home of have seemed a small price to pay for the social glo- izing Moses Mendelssohn. “Her notebook, which a couple who themselves were still Jewish and per- ry they achieved. Paradoxically, however, one clear contains many of the philosopher’s sayings, bears haps take their seats next to some former Jews who function of their salons was to help launch German witness to this. So does the whole course of her life,” had only recently become Catholics. and Austrian Jews’ struggle for civic emancipation. Spiel writes. But unlike her Berlin doppelgänger, the Mozart had enjoyed the hospitality of the Arn- All of these themes come to the fore in Hilde wealthy salonnière Amalia Beer, or, for that matter, steins on previous occasions and even lived for eight Spiel’s biography of Fanny von Arnstein, which was Mendelssohn himself, Fanny paid little attention to months in one of the apartments in their vast home first published in 1962 in German, and republished the question of whether and how to reform Juda- back in 1781. Receiving their support did not, alas, in an elegant edition by New Vessel Press in 2013. ism. She sustained only a very faint adherence to restrain him from uttering nasty comments about (Both it and an earlier edition from Berg, long out of her ancestral faith and failed to keep even that alive other Jews, even Fanny’s closest friend. Two years print, were translated by Spiel’s daughter, Christine for the next generation. It comes as no surprise that before, when Eleonore Fliess was caught up in a Shuttleworth.) Spiel’s book is a fascinating docu- her only child, Henriette, and her husband baptized public scandal, the composer felt free to denounce ment, but it is not for everyone. Readers bewildered their children and soon afterward became Catholics her as a haupt-Sau, “a hog of the first order,” in a let- by her offhand references to scores of rulers, trea- themselves, with Fanny’s apparent consent. ter he wrote to his father. His choice of this epithet ties, wars, and regulations may have to skim here The ambiguous religious environment inhabited surely reflected the fact that many towns across the and there to enjoy the period detail, especially Spiel’s by her heroine was not far from the one in which German states and the Habsburg Empire had for lavish primary quotations and her spicy portraits of Hilde Spiel herself had been raised. Her own parents centuries featured large, grotesque public sculptures the various personalities in the Arnstein entourage. had both become Catholics before she was born in of female pigs suckling Jewish children. Spiel’s profound identification with Fanny’s life and 1911, and until she left Austria for London in 1936, In the grand concert that April afternoon, and in times animates the narrative, and her idiosyncratic she seems to have had a faint Jewish identity at best. the shadow hostility of Mozart’s letter, we see some biography brings to life this gripping and appealing Nor did she acquire much feeling for Judaism dur- of the key features of turn-of-the-19th-century Jew- historical episode. ing her 27 years in London or after she returned ish salons. Like their famous models in Paris and Scholars of the era, on the other hand, will likely to live in Vienna in 1963. Even though her grand- other capitals, they were informal intellectual gath- be frustrated with Spiel’s often frivolous judgments, mother met her death at Theresienstadt, and her erings in the homes of educated women that pro- her frequent meanderings, and her failure to en- parents escaped to London only at the last moment, vided alternative intellectual and social spaces for gage in serious historical analysis. Readers aware of she kept her distance from all things Jewish. Spiel a mixed society. While offering such women a rare the profound culture wars within the 19th-century and her first husband, the essayist Peter de Mendels- opportunity to play a public role, they also facilitat- Jewish world will be shocked by Spiel’s casual con- sohn, also of Jewish heritage, sent their two children ed contacts among writers, journalists, publishers, descension toward traditional Jews, “fanatical Tal- to Catholic schools. Hilde went to great lengths to composers, musicians, and dilettantes from various mudists,” who, she says, “obstinately opposed any have her father’s ashes buried in a Catholic cemetery social classes and religions. But it was only in Berlin attack on their ancient rights.” Spiel seems blissfully back in Vienna. Her second husband, Hans Flesch and Vienna that such gatherings were presided over unaware of the worries among both traditionalists von Brunningen, was also a nobleman with some by Jewish women. and reformers that assimilation, combined with Jewish lineage. Her daughter recounts that when an Some of these women—like Fanny von Arn- civic emancipation, would result in the depletion of Austrian interviewer began his session with her by stein—came from the families of what have been Jewish numbers, culture, and vigor. the assertion “Frau Spiel, Sie sind Jüdin” (“Frau Spiel, called “Court Jews.” Since the 17th century, numer- you are Jewish”), her face froze with disapproval, as ous Central European courts, both large and small, anny von Arnstein had the good luck to be one Michael Z. Wise tells us in his useful introduction. had welcomed hundreds of enterprising Jews to Fof the 16 children born to Daniel and Mariane Still, the tone of the biography seems to reflect a sell jewelry, exchange currencies, float loans, mint Itzig, the wealthiest and most privileged family of lingering regret at Spiel’s own family’s total departure coins, and collect taxes. If Court Jews provided eco- Court Jews in Prussia in the 18th century. She left from Judaism. It is hard not to read the book as a

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 25 return of sorts to a heritage that Hilde Spiel did not and both knew in their bones that salons and mar- scholar once told me with absolute confidence that really possess in her own lifetime. Fanny von Arn- riages were the surest route to individual assimila- the book really was intended as fiction. stein was an ideal role model for Hilde Spiel. She tion, especially if one was a woman. In view of the fact that she published it in 1962, was graced with lavish wealth and good looks, had it is impressive that Spiel chose Fanny von Arnstein’s married well, and seemed to all appearances to be ac- ust as Fanny von Arnstein begs comparison life journey to describe the era in which she lived. cepted by the aristocracy, yet she remained nominal- Jwith Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, Spiel’s biogra- Although she lacked adequate primary sources, one ly loyal to Judaism. Readers who cast a more ironic phy of the former has to be compared to Hannah is still grateful for the attempt. Certainly contem- gaze on the hypocrisies of the salon era may well be Arendt’s famous 1957 biography of the latter. porary pundits who have blithely labeled Arnstein irritated with Spiel’s gushing enthusiasm for Fanny’s social connections. She overlooks entirely the possibility that Fanny, like any salonnière of her era, would of necessity have had to be fawning and sycophantic. Those familiar with the parallel scene in Berlin will immediately want to contrast the lives of Fanny von Arnstein and her more famous peer, the Berlin salonnière Rahel Levin Varnhagen von Ense. Con- temporary scholars who labor to illuminate the latter’s life have in their hands bountiful source material by comparison. Rahel left behind a huge corpus of letters, diaries, and even a dream journal. These texts allow us to enter her inner life and explore how a sensitive soul experienced the contradictions of her position in Berlin society. The acuity of her insights and the audacity of her social ambitions have inspired literary historians to elevate Varnhagen to the status of a major intellectual of the era. No one will ever do this for Fanny von Arnstein. But in terms of social practices and values, the two women had quite a bit in common. Both had a shirt-tail connection to the nobility, Rahel through her 1814 marriage to Karl Varnhagen von Ense, a younger diplomat, and Fanny through her husband Nathan’s ennoblement in 1795 and his receipt of a Above: Hilde Spiel as a young woman, ca. 1936. baronetcy in 1798. Both women enjoyed intimate (Courtesy of New Vessel Press.) Left: Engraving of friendships with powerful nobles and court figures, Baroness Fanny von Arnstein by von Guérin, from a painting by von Kininger, 1804. (Courtesy of the Jewish Museum, London.) JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS When Arendt first began the research for her book, “Austria’s first feminist” fail to distinguish between in the late 1920s in Berlin, she tentatively embraced the ancient and the modern in the salonnière role. Subscriber Benefits a Zionist perspective. Readers of the volume that Nonetheless, readers of this new edition will be able she ultimately produced could well conclude from to glimpse beyond the flaws of this fascinating, oc- the evidence presented that her subject was a par- casionally maddening, book to see the more com- venue, mostly interested in her own climb out of plex and interesting reality of a remarkable woman Jewishness. In subsequent publications, however, at a pivotal moment in Jewish and European history. Arendt tried to make the case that we should con- Considering the fate of Fanny von Arnstein’s sider Rahel a rebel, an example of a type she fa- physical remains, we must be grateful to have this mously called the “conscious pariah.” biography as an evocative memorial to her life. In Unlike Spiel, Arendt asked penetrating questions 1818, she was buried in a Jewish ceremony in the about the Jewish fate in this era, but her prose was Wäring cemetery in Vienna. In 1942, Nazi officials Magazine Web App e-Book choppy and convoluted. Spiel’s biography is undoubt- ordered the removal of her remains, which were ap- edly the better read. One might say that each book parently sent to the local Natural History Museum Your subscription includes our magazine and many reflects the spirit of the particular city in which both as part of an insane scheme to study the physical other subscriber benefits located on our the biographers and their subjects lived. Arendt’s residue of prominent Jewish families. To this day website and app. Some highlights: book evokes Berlin: sharp, invigorating, sometimes the museum refuses to confirm that it possesses the Web-only: Allan Nadler’s exposé of Reza Aslan’s disconcerting. Spiel’s biography of Arnstein evokes corpse, or what is left of it now. Though it would questionable Jesus expertise and more. Vienna: pleasant and amusing, but intellectually be a mistake to use this sad episode to sum up the App bonus feature: Original newsreel footage lightweight. meaning of Fanny’s life, her empty grave is nonethe- of T.E. Lawrence’s WW I exploits. Spiel later identified her biography of Fanny as less a somber metaphor for the fate of her people in Archive: Anita Shapira’s “The Kibbutz and the her favorite of her published books, most of which modern times. State,” along with all the articles from our first five years. were novels, collected journalism, or memoirs. She e-Book: Our first ever e-book, JRB Israel. declared that “the research for this book alone had brought with it moments of true happiness.” She was Deborah Hertz holds the Herman Wouk Chair in Take advantage of all your subscriber benefits! certainly aware of the paucity of primary sources, Modern Jewish Studies and is a professor of history at Visit: making it quite impossible to construct a narrative the University of California, San Diego. She is the author www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/user/register based on knowledge of Fanny von Arnstein’s inner of Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin (Yale www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/app-access life. She does not actually make up events, but at University Press) and How Jews Became Germans: A times is all too cavalier about her lack of references. History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin (Yale

Jewish Culture. Cover to Cover. Historians seeking to utilize the book for scholarly University Press). Both have been published in German purposes must therefore be careful. Indeed, another editions.

26 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 Tested Loyalties

BY sharon Hart-Green

not, our country is a democracy.” age, Bezmozgis seems to have named him after the The Betrayers: A Novel Some of the women in the novel are also guilty well-known human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler, who by David Bezmozgis of betrayal. Kotler’s young mistress Leora betrays fought vigorously for Sharansky’s release.) Little, Brown and Company, 256 pp., $16 her friendship with Kotler’s daughter by entering As Bezmozgis deftly shows, betrayal is not a simple matter. Yet the author is not suggesting that there is no such thing as evil. Indeed he portrays Can one justify the betrayal the Soviet system and its reliance on informers as hat if a national leader chooses to rotten to the core. But individual responsibility is bring disgrace on his family rather of one ideal for the sake of another matter, an issue around which Bezmozgis than compromise his political be- builds the climax of the novel. This takes place in liefs? This is what happens in Da- another? the form of a fateful confrontation between Kotler vidW Bezmozgis’ tautly written novel The Betrayers, and Tankilevich, his old friend turned informer. which was recently granted the National Jewish into an illicit affair with her father. In fact, Leora’s In Crimea, will Kotler finally release his anger and Book Award for fiction. As in his two prior works betrayal plays a key role in the novel; if it weren’t lash out at his friend’s treachery? Or will Tankilev- of fiction, Natasha and The Free World, Bezmozgis for her, Kotler would never have been forced to flee ich’s poor health and pathetic circumstances cause concentrates on the unique struggles faced by Jews Israel for, of all places, Crimea, where he soon con- Kotler to relent? It is during this tensely charged who fled what was once the Soviet Union. fronts his betrayer Tankilevich. Even Kotler’s devot- confrontation that Kotler finally learns why Tanki- The protagonist of The Betrayers is Baruch ed wife Miriam, who lobbied tirelessly to secure her levich betrayed him. Where Kotler chose principle Kotler, who suffered 13 years of imprisonment in husband’s release from the Gulag, is also presented over family, Tankilevich chose family over princi- the Soviet Gulag before moving to Israel and be- as a kind of betrayer. Although she was thoroughly ple. But is one position really more moral than the coming a celebrated political leader. This is Natan Sharansky’s real-life story, of course, and apparently his body, too. (In addition to having a wry sense of humor like Sharansky’s, Kotler is short, stocky, and bald.) But utterly unlike Sharansky, Baruch Kotler has both a mistress, Leora, and a blackmailer. In order to avoid allowing the latter to take control of his political life, he flees Israel. The resulting scandal not only tarnishes his public image but also pains and humiliates his wife and children. Attempting to explain his position on the phone to his outraged daughter, Kotler is unwavering:

There are matters of principle where you cannot compromise. Under any circumstances. If I’d compromised, it would have been worse. Far worse for all of us. For our country and for our family, which is part of our country.

Although this fervent dedication to the national good is also reminiscent of Sharansky, the woman- izing, needless to say, is not. But by placing Baruch Kotler in this situation, Bezmozgis challenges the reader to consider what a hero might do in a similar predicament. Can one justify the betrayal of one ideal for the sake of another? David Bezmozgis. (Courtesy of David Franco.) Yet Baruch Kotler is not the chief betrayer in the novel. Kotler was himself the victim of a cruel secular when she married Kotler, Miriam began to other? Bezmozgis does the old-fashioned literary betrayal at the hands of his former friend Vladi- embrace religion so zealously during her husband’s work of compelling the reader to confront the in- mir Tankilevich, who almost 40 years earlier had long imprisonment (again, the borrowing from evitability of tragedy in the face of such impossible denounced him to the KGB, leading to Kotler’s in- reality is obvious) that after Kotler’s release, he felt choices. Tankilevich even fatuously suggests that carceration in the Gulag not for being a dissident, that “the woman I found wasn’t quite the woman Kotler is the lucky one: which he was, but for working for the CIA, which I’d married.” Kotler’s subsequent love affair with he was not. In fact, most of the book’s characters are the young (and decidedly secular) Leora becomes Say what you will, but you benefited from this guilty of betrayal in one form or another. The Israeli somewhat understandable—though never justified, Gulag. You had thirteen dark years followed by government is a betrayer in the eyes of Kotler’s ide- even in Kotler’s own mind. One might even suggest how many bright ones? Without those thirteen alistic son Benzion because of its plan to evict Israeli that as an author Bezmozgis is also guilty of betrayal years, where would you be? . . . Those thirteen settlers from their homes, while Benzion is guilty of for modeling his protagonist so closely on the figure years were your lottery ticket. betrayal in his father’s eyes for preparing to disobey of Sharansky. Kotler is a vivid, believable character, orders. Kotler argues that no matter how much he but at what price do authors make such decisions? otler is not one to be torn apart by inner agrees with his son’s Zionist principles: “Like it or (Perhaps to soften the blow, or as a form of hom- Kmoral conflict. He states confidently that he

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 27 would rather die or sacrifice a family member ler, Bezmozgis shows that the Jewish return to Zion reader learns right from the beginning, Kotler is than be responsible for an innocent man’s suffer- remains a noble enterprise. This is not to assume, not a saint. He is, after all, a human being who (like ing. His mistress Leora isn’t persuaded. Rather of course, that Bezmozgis necessarily shares all of the biblical king David recalled in the final words than admire him for his moral certainty, she re- Kotler’s views on Israel and Zionism. of the novel) is prone to sin. But Kotler’s hero- acts with coolness, as if “he’d been weighed in the In his portrayal of Kotler, Bezmozgis succeeds ism, though dimmed, is not really diminished by balance and found wanting.” This raises the ques- in depicting a man of conviction whose love for human error, as his final act in this thought- tion of loyalty, which is, of course, the flip side of his nation exceeds even his love for his family. As provoking novel subtly demonstrates. betrayal. If one cannot be loyal to one’s family Leora senses, this makes him different from the or- over all others, is that unnatural, even un-Jewish? dinary person and, in some ways, unfathomable, As Bezmozgis knows, this question applies to the perhaps even unlikeable. (Does he deserve his wife Sharon Hart-Green has taught Hebrew and Yiddish nation as well. Miriam’s tender forgiveness?) Ironically, this is literature at the University of Toronto. Her latest Certainly as a Jewish author, Bezmozgis demon- also part of his greatness, since it is only the rare book, Bridging the Divide: The Selected Poems of strates his own sense of loyalty through his clear- individual who is willing to put the public good Hava Pinhas-Cohen (Syracuse University Press), is eyed portrayal of Israel on the world stage. In Kot- above the needs of his own loved ones. Yet as the forthcoming in fall 2015. Everything Is PR

BY Marci Shore

Pomerantsev, a Kiev-born British television pro- [Dinara] liked being a prostitute—or at least Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: ducer in his mid-30s, spent a decade working in she didn’t mind. But what of Allah? He hated The Surreal Heart of the New Russia post-Soviet Moscow. Nothing Is True and Everything whoring. She could feel his rebuke. It kept her by Peter Pomerantsev Is Possible is a portrait of Putin’s surreal new Rus- awake at night. Public Affairs, 256 pp., $16.99 sia, an alternative reality composed of intersecting I told her that I’m sure Allah keeps things in perspective.

This is a book full of sex, His irony veils a human empathy of which he can- othing Is True and Everything Is Possi- violence, and disco music. not quite rid himself, even when circumstances are ble: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia inauspicious. opens with Oliona, a 22-year-old “gold- alternative realities. A native Russian speaker with a “Did you always want to be gangster?” Pomer- digger” with a perfect body. When she slightly odd accent, the author spends a lot of time antsev asks Vitaly. They are filming an interview. Vi- Nwas 20, Oliona ran away from the Donbas, an east with prostitutes, gangsters, emotionally unstable taly, characteristically, is wearing a designer track- Ukrainian mining region presently the site of a war supermodels, television journalists, and “political suit, carefully ironed. His “alma mater” is prison. between Russian-backed separatist forces and the technologists.” He is probing, inquisitive, voyeuris- He drinks cappuccino and plans to become a film- Ukrainian state. In Moscow, she worked as a strip- tic—as journalists must be if they are any good. Yet maker, having been inspired by Titantic starring per at a casino before she succeeded in meeting a he is also a deeply decent person, who never forgets Leonardo DiCaprio. “How many have you killed?” “Forbes”—a billionaire in search of a mistress. Now that he is dealing with human beings: Pomerantsev asks him. “I can only talk about one she lives in a brand-new apartment and receives a car, $4000 a month, vacations in the Middle East, and a small dog—“the basic Moscow mistress rate.” For the moment things are good: She frequents the most expensive sushi bars and the most selective nightclubs. She giggles and wears sparkly dresses and has memorized a few stanzas of Pushkin’s Eu- gene Onegin to impress a Forbes who likes literature. Then again, neither the apartment nor anything in it belongs to her. And her shelf life is not long; she is competing with thousands of 18-year-olds who can do gymnastics in stilettos. Oliona is not a prostitute. To her the distinction is nontrivial: She has no pimp. She chooses her billionaire lovers. Dinara, who is of Oliona’s generation and equally sympathetic and even cheerful, works under much less glamorous conditions. She grew up in the Russian republic of Dagestan, east of Chech- nya. Now she spends her evenings at a weakly lit proletarian bar near a train station. She lets Peter Pomerantsev buy her whiskey and colas and pizza— but not with pepperoni, because she is a Muslim. Wahhabi preachers from Saudi Arabia have captivated her sister, who now wears a headscarf and is contemplating becoming a Black Widow, a suicide bomber. “Two sisters. One a prostitute. The other on jihad,” Pomerantsev summarizes. Partying in a Moscow nightclub. (© Robert Wallis/Corbis.)

28 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 time. That was revenge for my brother,” Vitaly an- sia Today (RT) presents “a Russian point of view.” lover Alexey leaves her. The interrogations begin to swers, almost apologetically. Gangsters, we learn, Many who work at television stations like RT are drive her to insanity: “Black is white and white is can be likeable, even sensitive in their way. personally, “subjectively” liberal. Yet they are eas- black. There is no reality. Whatever they say is real- Oliona’s first boyfriend—the only one she ever ily induced to ask the right questions, such as “Why ity.” All Yana can do is scream. loved—was a local gangster in her town in the Don- is the opposition to you so small, Mr. President?” In her 1967 essay “Truth and Politics,” Hannah bas. One day two rival gangsters kidnapped her In any case—they argue—why not allow Russia to Arendt returned to the issue of the totalitarian re- and took her back to their vodka and pickled fish– have a point of view? It all becomes a matter of per- gime’s attitude toward truth. At issue here—Arendt scented apartment filled with barbells and deco- spective, articulated with language borrowed from clarifies—are not the principles of geometry or rated with a Soviet flag; they tied her to a chair and corporate capitalism: Putin is “the President of ‘sta- Kant’s categorical imperative, but “factual truth”— raped her repeatedly. “Happens to all the girls. No bility.’” (“‘Stability,’” Pomerantsev writes, “the word empirical and thus necessarily contingent facts, biggie,” she tells Pomerantsev. is repeated again and again in a myriad of seem- such as the truth that in 1914 Germany invaded Bel- “Do I even need to mention that Oliona grew up ingly irrelevant contexts until it echoes and tolls like gium. It is this second kind of truth, Arendt tells us, fatherless?” Pomerantsev writes. “As did Lena, Nata- a great bell and seems to mean everything good.”) that is assaulted by modern totalitarian regimes— sha, and all the gold diggers I met. All fatherless. A Stalin was an “effective manager.” Putin is “the most either through outright denial or “the blurring of generation of orphaned, high-heeled girls, looking ‘effective manager’ of all.” Foreigners and other well- the dividing line between factual truth and opinion.” Those who lie are activists who want to change the world and who might well succeed. “It is true,” Arendt writes, “considerably more than the whims of historians would be needed to eliminate from the record the fact that on the night of August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the frontier of Belgium; it would require no less than a power monopoly over the entire civilized world.” She adds: “But such a power monopoly is far from being inconceivable.” Rereading Arendt’s essay after watching Putin’s March 2014 Crimea speech is uncanny. The late February 2014 victory of the popular revolution on Kiev’s Maidan was the beginning of an unde- clared Russian invasion of Ukraine. So-called “little green men” wearing black masks and unmarked camouflage, not admitting to being Russian forces, appeared on the Crimean peninsula. Within days, a fraudulent referendum and the annexation of Crimea became the occasion for Putin’s hypnotic speech on March 18, 2014.

A referendum was held in Crimea on March 16 in full compliance with democratic procedures and international norms. More than 82 percent Supporters react as they watch the speech of Russian President Vladimir Putin on a screen in central of the electorate took part in the vote. Over Sevastopol, Crimea, Ukraine, March 18, 2014. (© Zurab Kurtsikidze/epa/Corbis.) 96 percent of them spoke out in favor of reuniting with Russia . . . In people’s hearts and minds, Crimea has always been an inseparable for a daddy as much as a sugar daddy.” The ultimate meaning people who work for RT justify their par- part of Russia. This firm conviction is based sugar daddy in this story, of course, is Vladimir ticipation with the enlightened thought that “There on truth and justice and was passed from Vladimirovich Putin: is no such thing as objective reporting.” They are generation to generation, over time, under any also well paid. “Everyone is for sale in this world,” circumstances. Strippers writhe around poles chanting: “I Pomerantsev writes, “even the most ‘liberal’ jour- want you, Prime Minister.” . . . The mood at the nalists have their price.” The RT camera continually turned from Putin to “Putin Party” is a mix of feudal poses and arch, faces in the audience: approving, beaming, eyes postmodern irony: the sucking up to the master his is a book full of sex, violence, and disco mu- welling with tears of joy. completely genuine, but as we’re all liberated, Tsic. My undergraduate students at Yale loved it; In “Truth and Politics” Arendt describes old- twenty-first-century people who enjoy Coen some read it in one sitting. The narrative features fashioned lies as a tear in the fabric of reality; the brothers films, we’ll do our sucking up with an pink heels, private helicopters, and fantastical Mid- careful observer can perceive the place where the ironic grin while acknowledging that if we were summer Night’s Dream parties with trapeze artists fabric has been torn. In contrast, totalitarianism ever to cross him, we would quite quickly be dead. and synchronized swimmers dressed as mermaids. brought something new: The “modern political It also features a seven-year-old who weighs over lie” involves the creation of a seamless new reality. Not only morality, but also reality itself is am- a hundred kilos (220 pounds), a supermodel who There is no tear to perceive. biguous here: Pomerantsev describes Russia as a jumped from her apartment to her death nine floors “fragile reality show” choreographed by the political below, and hot dog stands that catered to the onlook- ne of the best films made about Stalinism is technologists. The role of mass media is dazzling— ers who appeared outside a Moscow theater while Othe 1982 film Interrogation, set nearly in its en- like the effect of the new money and the disorient- Chechen terrorists held everyone inside hostage. tirety inside a Stalinist prison cell. Krystyna Janda ing juxtapositions of the pre-modern and the post- One story Pomerantsev tells is of Yana, another plays Tonia, a promiscuous young nightclub singer modern: oligarchs and peasants, glittering dance alluring young woman with an enviable wardrobe in postwar Poland, full of both joie de vivre and de- clubs and moldy Soviet prison cells, warlords who and a private fitness trainer. Yana, who runs a suc- spair over her husband’s suspected infidelity. When use Twitter. cessful business trading in industrial cleaning prod- she is arrested on fictitious charges of aiding enemies “Propaganda,” an old-fashioned word, relates to ucts, is inexplicably arrested. She learns that the key of People’s Poland, her interrogators are willing to Soviet times. The new Russia generates “PR.” “Ev- ingredient in the cleaning products—for which she use all means at their disposal to extract a confes- erything is PR” has become Moscow’s guiding prin- has a license—has suddenly, with no warning or ex- sion. A certain Olcha, whom the interrogators allege ciple. The state-sponsored television station Rus- planation, become illegal. She is sent to prison; her is her lover, has been accused of espionage. Tonia is

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 29 stunned, disoriented, indignant. The interrogations tions? Who is behaving authentically? Who began as collage: an Orthodox Christian woman on a com- continue. The interrogators’ narrative develops: To- a paid provocateur but has lost a sense of the script? munist square christening a Muslim mercenary sol- nia resists, denies everything, changes details in her Who no longer knows who he is himself? dier to go kill phantom Nazis. story, and gradually resigns herself to greater por- “I sense the politics of provocation have led to a This is what Pomerantsev tries to make us un- tions of the interrogators’ narrative, although never crisis of subjectivity in the east,” I said to a Ukraini- derstand: In Putin’s Russia today there is not only a to that narrative in its entirety. What the film conveys so vividly is not only life Pomerantsev tries to make us understand that in Putin’s under Stalinism, but also a philosophical stance: There is epistemological confusion (confusion Russia there is not only a problem of knowledge about truth, about knowledge), but never ontological confusion (confusion about being). Stalinist prison is a site of but also a problem of the very existence of truth. fictions and manipulations. We never learn the true story: who—if anyone—had in fact opposed the re- an friend when we met in Kiev in May 2014. “Yes,” problem of knowledge about truth, but also a prob- gime, which men had been Tonia’s lovers, who Ol- he said ironically, “we are very post-modern.” lem of the very existence of truth. “The great drama cha was and what he had actually done. What we Kateryna Iakovlenko is one of the young orga- of Russia,” Pomerantsev writes, “is not the ‘transi- are certain of, though, is that there is a true story. nizers of Izolyatsia, a contemporary art center in tion’ between communism and capitalism . . . but We never learn what it is, but we are never given to the Donbassian city of Donetsk, whose space was that during the final decades of the USSR no one doubt that it has an objective existence, that there is seized by militants of the “Donetsk People’s Repub- believed in communism and yet carried on living as a distinction between truth and lies, fact and fiction, lic” and turned into a prison. Some of the unidenti- if they did, and now they can only create a society that there is such a thing as reality. fied “little green men” who came to Donetsk were of simulations.” Interrogation represents the modernist position: Chechens who did not speak very much Russian God may be dead, but that does not mean that truth and could not understand why Ukrainian currency n his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” is, even under a totalitarian regime. Not so in the sur- came out of the bank machines instead of Russian IVáclav Havel describes an ordinary greengrocer, real new Russia Pomerantsev describes.“[W]hen the rubles. On one occasion the Chechens fighting on who every day puts the sign saying “Workers of President will go on to annex Crimea and launch his the separatist side organized a meeting on Lenin the world unite!” in his vegetable shop window. Of new war with the West,” he writes, “RT will be in the Square. An elderly local woman attended and gave course the greengrocer does not believe the sign’s vanguard, fabricating startling fictions about fascists one of the Chechens an Orthodox christening to message, nor do the passers-by, nor even does the taking over Ukraine.” This new war Putin launched aid his victory in battle against the Ukrainian Na- regime. Nonetheless, everyone goes on pretending; with the West is being played out in the Donbas, zis. The German surrealist painter Max Ernst once they live as if they believed in communism. The where Oliona grew up. To this day it remains unclear described surrealist collage as “the coupling of two paradigm of living “as if”—pretending to admire what is happening there. Who is a Kremlin agent? realities which apparently cannot be coupled on a the emperor’s new clothes—was long the dominant Who is a mercenary? Who has been encouraged with plane which apparently is not appropriate to them.” mode of understanding late communism in both some money to act on his already-existing inclina- For Iakovlenko that scene was a macabre surrealist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

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30 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 Several years ago, the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak contested this paradigm in his 2006 book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No The More: The Last Soviet Generation. For Yurchak commentary “as if” is too binary; it falsely implies a stable classics if unarticulated clarity. He insists on the fluid space between dissidence and conformity, au- thenticity and inauthenticity, power and resistance. This is postmodernism: When we give up on replacing God and accept that there is BOOK SERIES nothing to guarantee the stability of self, world, truth. Pomerantsev’s anecdotal insights lead us precisely here: It is not so easy to determine what people “really” believe, where the bound- ary is between gullibility and enlightened cynicism. Everything is in flux. THE BEST ARTICLES. “It’s like they can define reality,” Yana, the businesswoman, says of her imprisonment and interrogation in the new Russia, “like the floor disappears from under you.” Arendt called this groundlessness (Bodenlosigkeit): “Consistent lying, metaphorically speaking, pulls the ground from under our feet and provides no other ground on which to stand.” Pomerantsev portrays Putin’s Russia as a kind of collective giving up on truth—and an attempt to take it lightly. “And then you realize,” Pomerantsev writes, after he accompanies Oliona to a nightclub for the super-wealthy, “how equal the Forbes and the girls really are.”

They all clambered out of one Soviet world. The oil geyser has shot them to different financial universes, but they still understand THE BEST AUTHORS. each other perfectly. And their sweet, simple glances seem to say how amusing this whole masquerade is, that yesterday we were all living in communal flats and singing Soviet anthems and thinking Levis and powdered milk were the height of luxury, and now we’re surrounded by luxury cars and jets and sticky Prosecco. And though many westerners tell me they think Russians are obsessed with money, I think they’re wrong: the cash has come so fast, like glitter shaken in a snow globe, that it feels totally unreal, not something to hoard and save but to twirl and dance in like feathers in a pillow fight and cut like papier-mâché into different, quickly changing masks.

Pomerantsev’s tone is light throughout, decep- tively so, for between the lines he is deadly serious. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is THE BEST OF arguably the most philosophically perceptive attempt to illuminate Putin’s Russia that we have. EVERY DECADE. Recently, at a conference, I spoke with a Russian colleague. Being in Moscow, she said, felt like being in a Road Runner cartoon where Wile E. THE COMMENTARY Coyote keeps running even after the bridge has long since disappeared from underneath him. CLASSICS ON KINDLE.

Marci Shore is associate professor of history at Yale AVAILABLE AT University. Her book Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 won a National Jewish Book Award. She is the author, most recently, of The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe and is currently writing a book about the Maidan.

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Jewish citizens for thoroughgoing rectification of electoral states in the 1948 presidential contest. Not The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver and the Jewish marginality.” This is a somewhat overwrought surprisingly, Truman resented this intrusion of do- Foundation of Israel way of saying the horrors of the Holocaust and Eng- mestic politics into Middle Eastern policy. He fumed by Ofer Shiff land’s turn against Zionism convinced many Ameri- at having Palestine distract his attention from the Syracuse University Press. 288 pp., $24.95. can Jews that Silver’s activist approach made more struggle with the Soviet Union over post-war Europe. sense than Wise’s strategy of caution. He feared the United States was being dragged into In the months following the end of World War II an unwanted overseas conflict in the Middle East—a and the ascension of Harry Truman to the presiden- conflict he believed was, as Shiff puts it, “potentially ong-time leaders of Jewish organizations cy, Silver mobilized a nationwide network of Zionist capable of unleashing a third world war.” are not easily retired, but by 1943, Rabbi activists—Christians as well as Jews—to undertake This was, however, more than the usual irritation a Stephen S. Wise realized he could no lon- a massive campaign of rallies, lobbying, petitions, president feels over nettlesome policy battles. A staffer ger steer the American Zionist movement and other protests to persuade the Truman admin- at the Truman Library not long ago stumbled upon Lunassisted. Approaching 70 and in declining health, istration to support Jewish statehood. According to a previously unknown diary the president kept, in Wise already had his hands full with his duties as head Shiff, the reason Silver’s campaign attracted wide- the back of an old ledger, which included this jarring of the American Jewish Congress, the World Jewish spread support was that it appealed to Jews who comment, dated July 21, 1947: Congress, and his rabbinical seminary, the Jewish In- wanted “to actively express their solidarity with the stitute of Religion. Chaim Weizmann, president of the [Holocaust] victims and survivors but who wished The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do World Zionist Organization, suggested bringing in to do so without reinforcing their sense of collective they have any judgement on world affairs. . . . Abba Hillel Silver, a prominent 49-year-old Cleveland powerlessness.” At the same time, Christians liked it The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care rabbi and dynamic Zionist orator. Wise reluctantly not how many Estonians, Latvians, agreed that “the work should come into the hands of a Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get younger and stronger man—and he is the man.” Silver murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] was named co-chair, alongside Wise, of the American P[ersons] as long as the Jews get Zionist Emergency Council, the umbrella for the ma- special treatment. Yet when they have jor U.S. Zionist groups. The American Jewish com- power, physical, financial or political munity would never be the same again. neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything The Wise-Silver alliance did not last long. Barely on them for cruelty or mistreatment to a year later, Wise wrote to a colleague: “Pray for me. the under dog. I need the intervention of divine protection, unless I want to perish at the hand of the co-Chairman of the Emergency Council.” Clashing personalities and dueling egos were part of the problem, but political differences were the real issue. Wise, a staunch supporter of President Franklin Roosevelt, advocated political caution and Jewish loyalty to the Demo- cratic Party. Silver, an advocate of forthright political activism, sought to increase Jewish leverage in Wash- ington by convincing Republican leaders to woo Jew- ish voters. When the GOP added a pro-Zionist plank to its 1944 platform, the Democrats were forced to Rabbis Abba Hillel Silver and Stephen S. Wise after a match it. All this Jewish infighting, competition for meeting with President Roosevelt at the White House, Jewish electoral support, and tension with the White March 9, 1944. (© Bettmann/CORBIS.) House may sound familiar to observers of the contemporary political scene. The fact that the Zionist lobbyist Benzion Netanyahu was deeply involved in because it was “rooted not in a quest for exclusivity, the 1940s contacts with Republicans only makes the but rather in a desire to solve the continuous prob- parallels seem all the more uncanny. lem of Jewish marginality.” One suspects, however, The trouble between Wise and Silver came to a that the average person signing a Zionist petition head at the end of 1944, when Silver, over the Roo- or taking part in a rally likely was responding to sevelt administration’s objections, pressed for a con- newsreel footage of the liberated death camps and gressional resolution endorsing Zionist aims—while not thinking very much about notions of collective Wise was quietly assuring the White House that powerlessness or marginality. he would do nothing for the resolution against the Silver encouraged the perception that Jewish vot- president’s wishes. This conflict provided Wise the ers would turn against the Democratic Party if the ad- pretext he needed to engineer Silver’s ouster. Within ministration abandoned the Zionist cause. Shiff char- An entry from President Truman’s diary, July 21, six months, however, a wave of grass-roots pressure acterizes Silver’s suggestions as “crude political force,” 1947. (Courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum.) returned Silver to power. Ofer Shiff, in his new study although Truman’s advisers, assessing the mood in the The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver and the Foundation Jewish community, reached similar conclusions. They of Israel, explains Silver’s resurgence this way: “Silver’s repeatedly warned the president that Jewish anger That harsh sentiment dovetailed with previously public strength lay in his success at using Zionism as over his Palestine policy could result in Democratic documented statements made by Truman about a means of transforming American-Jewish concerns losses in the New York City mayoral race of 1945, in Jews, such as this remark in a July 30, 1946 cabi- into a determined demand on behalf of American- congressional elections in 1946, and ultimately in key net discussion about Jewish dissatisfaction over his

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 33 Palestine policy: “Jesus Christ couldn’t please them prevailed, Truman might not have come to the fate- There is an interesting footnote to this episode. when he was here on earth, so could anyone expect ful decision of recognizing Israel.” The story is an in- On March 10, 1948, syndicated columnist Drew that I would have any luck?” dictment not only of Silver the man, but of the entire Pearson reported what he described as a recent strategy of forthright Jewish political behavior. Over conversation about Palestine between Truman and hiff alludes to Truman’s “caustic” remarks about the years, the tale has made its way from narrow his- New York Post publisher Ted Thackrey. Pearson SJews, but sidesteps the recent controversy con- tories of American Zionism to major biographies of wrote: “Pounding his desk, [Truman] used words cerning those remarks. This is surprising, consider- Truman, such as Robert Ferrell’s Harry S. Truman: that can’t be repeated about ‘the (blank) New York ing the implications of the episode. For American A Life and David McCullough’s best-selling Truman. Jews.’ ‘Those (blank) New York Jews are disloyal Jews who revere Truman for his recognition of the Rabbi Warshal, however, seems to be the first to use to their country. Disloyal!’” Thackrey responded, newborn State of Israel, the revelation of the diary the fist-pounding story to claim that Silver provoked “When you speak of New York Jews are you re- entry came as quite a shock. There were even those Truman into an anti-Semitic outburst. ferring to such people as Bernard Baruch? Or are who tried to explain it away by blaming Silver. Bruce It is not clear how Silver could have “stormed” you referring to such New York Jews as my wife S. Warshal, a Florida rabbi and one-time newspaper (Warshal’s term) Truman’s office, in view of the Secret [Dorothy Schiff]?” According to Pearson, “Tru- publisher, writing in the journal of the Central Con- Service agents guarding the premises. Moreover, on man glared, assured his visitor he did not mean ference of American Rabbis, argued that Truman’s the only two occasions Silver visited the White House to include Baruch or the publisher’s wife, then anti-Semitism was an understandable response to during the Truman years, he was accompanied by abruptly changed the subject.” Truman denied the the fact that “while Truman was working . . . to help Stephen Wise in one instance, and by Wise, as well story; Pearson stood his ground. Is it possible that Jews, he was the object of ever-increasing Jewish as Zionist officials Nahum Goldmann and Louis Truman, in his complaints to Eddie Jacobson or political pressure.” The president had a right to be Lipsky, in the second. Yet there is no fist-pounding others about “disrespectful” Jewish behavior, was “livid,” according to Warshal, because “Rabbi Abba mentioned in either Truman’s published memoir, or actually projecting something of his own intem- Hillel Silver, one of the leading American Zionists in the autobiographies or private correspondence of perate ways? of the time, actually stormed into Truman’s office Silver, Wise, Goldmann, or Lipsky. A little sleuth- and pounded his fists on his desk.” ing reveals that if one traces the allegation back far he major focus of Shiff’s book, as its title indi- The fist-pounding allegation shows up with re- enough, it ultimately leads to a remark once made Tcates, is the post-statehood period. American markable frequency in books and articles about the about Silver by Elinor Borenstine, the daughter of Zionist organizations did not go out of business period. Often it is presented as evidence that the ob- Truman’s Jewish friend and business partner, Eddie once Israel was established. Instead, they turned noxious, belligerent Silver—as the face of obnoxious, Jacobson. Mrs. Borenstine, however, was relying on their attention to fundraising for the new state, belligerent American Jews in general—endangered a 1968 essay by her father, in which he reported only while at the same time devoting considerable time the entire Zionist enterprise through his outrageous Truman’s complaint about “how disrespectful and to fretting over—and quarreling with Israeli lead- attempt to physically intimidate the president of the how mean certain Jewish leaders had been to him.” ers about—the nature and purpose of Zionism in United States. Silver’s “militant” approach “occa- Jacobson wrote nothing about fist-pounding, nor did the diaspora. As Shiff shows, Silver articulated a sionally backfired,” a typical account asserts, claim- he even mention Silver by name. His daughter’s em- Zionist vision in which a comfortable and con- ing that Silver’s fist-pounding led him to be banned bellishment triggered a small avalanche of baseless tent American Jewish community would continue from the White House, and “[h]ad not cooler heads accusations that reverberate to this day. to thrive, alongside the young State of Israel. Not

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34 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 surprisingly, Israeli leaders would have preferred a ter of fact, it is not much different than the long- men occurred in the early 1950s, when the General more Israel-centric arrangement, in which Ameri- range vision of the Labor Zionists, with their dream Zionists increased their Knesset representation from can Jewry devoted itself almost entirely to Israel- of a socialist Jewish state as part of a socialist world, seven seats to 20, making them the second largest related philanthropy and actively encouraged its or the religious Zionists, with their dream of a Torah party in Israel’s parliament. The swirl of rumors in youth to make aliyah. It was, however, an argu- state as part of a messianic era. But Silver’s speeches the Israeli press about Silver supposedly planning to ment with precious little impact in the real world. in this regard sound more like boilerplate sermons make aliyah and become leader of the General Zi- Regardless of what Prime Minister David Ben-Gu- than planks in an action agenda. When Shiff at- onists surely stoked Ben-Gurion’s perception of him rion or other Israeli leaders preferred, or how either taches words such as “universalistic” and “postna- as a dangerous rival. Ben-Gurion’s calculated snubs side defined Zionism or Israel-diaspora relations, tionalist utopia” to Silver’s post-war rhetoric, he is of Silver during the latter’s visit to Israel in 1951, and very few American Jews were going to make aliyah invoking terminology that has stronger political again during Ben-Gurion’s visit to the United States or even take a serious interest in any of the various implications now than it did then. A 1956 sermon shortly afterward, probably had more to do with the flavors of Zionist ideology. Membership in all U.S. in which Silver referred vaguely to the notion that cut-throat nature of Israeli politics than a theoreti- Zionist organizations declined sharply after 1948. “Judaism is mankind’s religion of hope and renewal” cal disagreement about the role of Zionism in the One can understand why Shiff was tempted to is understood by Shiff to mean that Silver actually diaspora. draw some contemporary lessons from these post- was promoting “a new model in which the existen- One does not need to put the speeches of Abba war intra-Zionist squabbles. After wading through tial anxieties occasioned by the Holocaust had to be Hillel Silver under a magnifying glass to under- 270 pages of Zionist inside baseball, a weary reader translated into a global universalistic message.” Such stand their meaning, and his post-1948 sermons might legitimately ask: So what? over-reading is at least partly motivated by Shiff’s were not intended to combat “Jewish national and But Shiff’s attempt to answer that question takes attempt to contrast Silver the universalist with Ben- religious extremists,” as Shiff suggests. Nor, con- matters a little too far. In Shiff’s telling, the post-1948 Gurion the “statist.” versely, was Silver a fist-pounding fanatic who bitterness between Silver and Ben-Gurion reflected There was, to be sure, plenty of bad blood be- jeopardized the Zionist cause. He was passionate “a much broader struggle” that is “still relevant to- tween Ben-Gurion and Silver, but was it the result and did not always mince words, but he was not day.” On one side of this alleged struggle stood Ben- of a profound philosophical disagreement? There an irrational bully; he knew how to comport him- Gurion, with a “statist-Israeli agenda” that finds “its were more than enough personal and political dif- self in the presence of the president of the United cruder echo” today among “Jewish national and ferences between them to ensure years of acrimo- States, as Marc Lee Raphael showed in his 1989 religious extremists” who favor “exclusionism” and ny. To begin with, Silver was known to have been biography, which remains the finest study of the want to “separate Jews from their non-Jewish sur- sympathetic to Ben-Gurion’s arch-enemy, the Irgun man and his legacy. American Zionists, under roundings.” On the other side of the 1950s debate Zvai Leumi, the Jewish underground army led by Silver’s leadership, carried forward a program of stood Silver, who, according to Shiff, viewed the Menachem Begin during the British Mandate years. protests and lobbying that was entirely within the State of Israel “as a scaffold for the implementation That alone would have sufficed to land him on Ben- bounds of democratic discourse. of a universalistic Jewish vision.” Gurion’s enemies list. Certainly Shiff is correct that Silver regarded the Moreover, while Ben-Gurion was a devout so- creation of the State of Israel as the first step toward cialist, Silver supported the General Zionists, who Rafael Medoff is the founding director of The David an era of universal peace and brotherhood rather advocated free enterprise and compulsory arbitra- S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. His books than the ultimate goal, but that is what one would tion to resolve labor disputes. It is no coincidence include Historical Dictionary of Zionism (Scarecrow expect of a Zionist-minded Reform rabbi. As a mat- that the period of greatest tension between the two Press), coauthored with Chaim I. Waxman.

Posen Foundation קרן פוזן

The Posen Foundation is happy to congratulate its six s new doctoral fellows in the Posen Society of Fellows:

Anna Elena Torres from the University of California, Berkeley; Marina Zilbergerts from Stanford University; Michael Casper from the University of California Los Angeles; Noëmie Duhaut from University College London; Noga Bar-Or Bing from Ben Gurion University and Yemima Cohen-Aharoni from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

This is the third year of the Posen Society of Fellows, an international cohort of emerging scholars whose work deals with modern Jewish history and culture. Advisory Committee: Professor David Biale (Chair); Professor Israel Bartal; Professor David Myers; Professor Fania Oz-Salzberger; Professor Naomi Seidman; Professor Shulamit Valler.

* The fellowship is awarded by the Posen Foundation, the fellowships are for doctoral students working on modern Jewish history and culture, as part of the Foundation's goal to make the study of Judaism as Culture accessible to as many groups and communities as possible.

For more information: www.posenfoundation.com

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 35 Readings & reflections New Gleanings from an Old Book

BY ELli Fischer

consisting of a compact Babylonian Talmud, a ments between their respective teachers who have Ruth: From Alienation to Monarchy small set of Maimonides’ code of Jewish law, sever- hashed out their exegetical differences in the beit by Yael Ziegler al volumes of commentary on topics and tractates midrash itself or in pamphlets and journals pub- Koren Publishers Jerusalem, 506 pp., $29.95 under study, perhaps a few ethical or philosophi- lished in the Gush. The same thing is happening cal treatises, and a one-volume Tanakh. This is not nearby at the yeshiva’s sister institution for women, rare in itself. The Talmud often cites biblical verses, Migdal Oz. Rabbis Medan and Bin-Nun argued over key biblical his summer in Alon Shevut, a community in the Etzion Bloc, south of Jerusalem, narratives such as David’s relationship with Bathsheba like Lent will once again meet Mardi Gras. Ev- ery year here, the Herzog Academic Col- heavyweight prizefighters, throwing prooftexts at each legeT hosts its annual five-day seminar on the study of Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, during the week before other instead of punches. Tisha b’Av. This is a time when the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple is traditionally commemorated and meticulous students in every yeshiva are in the That is, Tanakh study in the Gush has partially by abstaining from meat and alcohol, from leisure habit of looking up the verse to read and under- displaced the Talmud at the heart of the yeshiva’s activities like swimming and vacationing, and even stand it in context. discourse. This is much more radical than outsiders from bathing and shaving. Despite this sobriety, at In this beit midrash, though, the Bibles are easier may realize, for study of the Bible for its own sake, the seminar people are always excited, enjoying the to spot as they inevitably have a bunch of color- and in particular the study of its literary structures, company of old friends, teaching colleagues, and coordinated Post-it tabs sticking out of the mar- has never been a central feature of the yeshiva cur- fellow Tanakh aficionados as they peruse the new gins. Opening to one of the marked pages reveals a riculum. This innovation is a legacy of the Gush’s books and compare notes with friends who have at- complex network of crisscrossing lines, highlighted founder, Rabbi Yehuda Amital (see “The Audacity of tended a different one of the seven lectures offered keywords, nested brackets that stress the structure Fait h ,” Fall 2011), who insisted from the outset that in each time slot (more than 200 lectures take place and topography of the biblical verses, and succinct Tanakh be part of the yeshiva’s curriculum. Two of over the course of the week). notes that send the reader to a similarly themed, the first students that Rabbi Amital attracted to his Grandmothers and their grandsons sit together, structured, or worded section of Tanakh. A student new yeshiva were Rabbi Yaakov Medan and Rabbi taking notes and debating subtleties. Charismatic who sits nearby will, inevitably, have an alternative Yoel Bin-Nun; their debates over biblical narrative teachers pack the lecture halls and are treated like reading of the same segment, and the disagreement became legendary within the yeshiva. They are re- rock stars as they roam the corridors. Innovative between the two of them may stem from disagree- membered as arguing over key biblical narratives scholars test out new ideas, happily anticipating the sparring that will ensue when the knowledgeable audience begins to push back. What began humbly a quarter-century ago as a continuing education program for a hundred of the college’s alumni now boasts more than 5,000 participants who come from all over Israel, as well as North America and Europe. The seminar is a visible expression of the explo- sion of biblical commentary that has emerged in “the Gush,” as Herzog College, the Beit Midrash for Wom- en–Migdal Oz, and their parent institution, Yeshivat Har Etzion, are collectively known, over the last four decades. These institutions have come to be identified with a distinctive new derekh ha-limud (way of learning) in their approach to the Bible. This provides an important shared vocabulary of study, but what allows this intellectual subculture to take root and thrive has been its inclusion in the beit midrash, the noisy, boisterous, uniquely Jewish “house of study.” Even if one were to conclude, as some academic Bible critics do, that Gush Tanakh is merely religiously correct, watered-down pseudo-scholarship that avoids examining or undermining orthodoxies, one must still understand it as an extraordinary and surprising phenomenon that has not been replicated in other circles of Jewish learning.

he beit midrash of Yeshivat Har Etzion is, in Tmost respects, like that of any other large, traditional yeshiva. Each student has barely enough Ruth in Boaz’s Field, 1828, by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. (Courtesy of the National Gallery, shelf space for a small personal reference library Washington D.C.)

36 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 such as Joseph’s concealment of his identity from lecture was prescient, but so was its context: Women his brothers or David’s relationship with Bathsheba are notably present and participate at every level of like heavyweight prizefighters, throwing prooftexts the intellectual discourse generated within the Gush. “There is simply no other book like at each other in the beit midrash instead of punches. The unique religious and intellectual environment Bin-Nun, the elder of the pair, was born to He- of the Gush cannot be divorced from the broader this. Enlightening, accessible, brew philologists and came to the Gush after study- context of post-1967 Israel. One can only ignore ing at the Merkaz Harav Kook yeshiva, where he had Tanakh for so long in Israel. The establishment of a and superbly written. . . . It will been imbued with the notion that Tanakh and the Jewish state after millennia of statelessness, followed no doubt be a coveted volume.” Land of Israel are metaphysically inseparable. His 19 years later by the resounding victory in the Six- subsequent studies of Tanakh attempt to reconstruct Day War, left Israel in possession of almost the entire —Maya Balakirsky Katz, Touro College the real-world settings in which biblical dramas un- biblical land of Israel, including the Etzion Bloc itself, fold in a way that is far from the bookish, often ha- which had been the site of several Jewish settlements giographical spirit of much rabbinic commentary. that fell on the eve of Israel’s independence. His preferred mode of teaching has been on-site, often on an archaeological dig. His interpretations he Gush Tanakh phenomenon is distinctly Is- often fly in the face of all prior Jewish interpretation, Traeli, distinctly religious Zionist in fact, but it though he is just as willing to disagree with present- has been increasingly influential in North American day archaeologists and academic scholars as with Modern Orthodox communities. A generation ago, classical commentators. Medan came from a simi- English-speaking students at the Gush would likely lar intellectual background; his father was a noted have encountered the approach in classes and on Hebrew grammarian. But unlike Bin-Nun his cre- Bible-in-hand hikes with Rabbi Menachem Leibtag. ativity is generally exercised in defense of the tradi- Leibtag challenged students to look at the broader tional commentators. One often finds him connect- themes, literary structure and composition, and geo- ing the dots between apparently stray statements graphical and historical setting of extended passages from across the rabbinic spectrum to demonstrate and even entire books of the Tanakh. His classes were how seemingly fanciful interpretations emerged among the first offerings of the Virtual Beit Midrash from straightforward inquiries into the biblical text. (vbm-torah.org), the Gush’s website established in Though reluctant to offer interpretations that fly in 1994. Within a few years, the VBM was hosting an the face of traditional exegesis, he is not dogmatic. impressive array of courses, as well as translations of Rather, he exploits textual gaps and quirks to imag- particularly significant articles from Megadim. ine entire dialogues and scenes as he attempts to Recently, Yeshivat Har Etzion, together with Je- show how midrashim emerge from a deep engage- rusalem’s Maggid Books, an imprint of Koren Pub- ment with the straightforward meaning of the text. lishers, launched its ambitious Studies in Tanakh se- Another influential personality in the yeshiva’s ries with the goal of producing book-length studies early years was Rabbi Dr. Mordechai Breuer. A friend of each biblical book. Most of these books also be- of Amital’s, he joined the yeshiva’s faculty to head its gan as VBM courses, including the fourth and most Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink Tanakh program. As the scion of a major German recent installment, Dr. Yael Ziegler’s Ruth: From Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts Orthodox rabbinic family, his brilliance, pedantry, Alienation to Monarchy. and self-certitude were virtually a birthright. At the Ruth, one of the shortest books in all of Tanakh, Edited by Marc Michael Epstein Gush, he argued that the Torah should be read as a has a simple plot: A man from Bethlehem moves With contributions by Eva Frojmovic, composite document—not because of multiple au- with his family to Moabite territory to ride out Jenna Siman Jacobs, Hartley Lachter, thorship, but because God’s truth is irreducible to a a famine in Judea, his two sons somewhat scan- Shalom Sabar, Raymond P. Scheindlin, Ágnes Vető, single human perspective. What began as debates in dalously marry Moabite women, and all the men Susan Vick, Barbara Wolff & Diane Wolfthal the beit midrash spilled over into the very first vol- subsequently die. The widowed matriarch, Naomi, umes of Herzog College’s quarterly journal on the decides to go back to Judea and discourages her study of Tanakh, Megadim, where, under Breuer’s daughters-in-law from accompanying her. One ac- The love of books in the Jewish tradition editorship, the back-and-forth between Medan and cedes, while the other, Ruth, famously declares her extends back over many centuries, and loyalty: “Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back Bin-Nun would unfold over multiple issues. They the ways of interpreting those books are engaged with the biblical text, but more importantly, and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go; as myriad as the traditions themselves. they engaged with each other, and in doing so they wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink offers the engaged with their students and audiences, drawing be my people, and your God my God. Where you them into the drama of their debate. die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus and first full survey of Jewish illuminated The nascent movement got a boost in the late more may the Lord do to me if anything but death manuscripts, ranging from their origins 1970s and early 1980s, when it began taking inspira- parts me from you.” (Ruth 1:16–17). Once back in in the Middle Ages to the present day. tion from academic scholars who were studying the Bethlehem, Ruth goes gleaning in the fields as a Featuring some of the most beautiful poetics of biblical narrative. Scholars such as Meir pauper to feed herself and Naomi, and she encoun- examples of Jewish art of all time— Sternberg at Tel Aviv University and Robert Alter ters the benevolence of Boaz, a relative and potential including hand-illustrated versions of the at the University of California, Berkeley, tended to redeemer. Their hunger temporarily abated, Naomi Bible, the Haggadah, the prayer book, bracket the traditional questions of academic bibli- cooks up a scheme for Ruth to seduce Boaz, which marriage documents, and other beloved cal criticism—who wrote this?—in favor of literary Ruth follows. After overcoming some legal hurdles, Jewish texts—the book introduces readers questions—what does it mean?—which was condu- Ruth and Boaz marry, and their great-grandson is to the history of these manuscripts and none other than King David. cive to the religious and intellectual environment of their interpretation. the Gush. By this time, Amital was sharing leadership Ziegler’s command of the body of interpretation of the yeshiva with Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein, of Ruth, from midrashic, to medieval Jewish exegetes, Cloth $60.00 who held a doctorate in English literature from Har- to contemporary scholars, is everywhere apparent, vard (he passed away in April of this year). In fact, but she tends to relegate technical discussions to the before coming to Israel, Lichtenstein had delivered a notes. Nevertheless, her book is not a quick or easy lecture in the early 1960s at Yeshiva University’s Stern read. Readers will have to work to follow her inter- See our E-Books at press.princeton.edu College for Women calling for a distinctively Ortho- pretive arguments, but helpful charts and diagrams dox literary study of the Bible. The content of that abound, and the payoff is more than academic.

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 37 In Ziegler’s presentation, the book of Ruth is a Interestingly, Ziegler treats the mother-in-law ously as exegesis and tries to understand what narra- contrast and corrective to the book of Judges. The Naomi as the protagonist of the book, but not its tive gaps the rabbis were trying to fill with even their opening verse sets the events of Ruth in the era hero. Whereas Ruth and Boaz are entirely positive least tenable interpretations. For example, several of the Judges (Ziegler barely addresses when the characters, in Ziegler’s reading Naomi is only some- midrashim condemn Naomi’s husband Elimelekh book was composed, noting that scholarly opinion what unsympathetic but redeemable—like Israelite for abandoning his people during a famine when is divided while referring interested readers to the society as a whole. The turning point, in Ziegler’s he could have sustained them with his wealth. As relevant studies), and indeed, the book of Ruth is reading, occurs when Naomi responds to the kind- Ziegler notes, nothing in the text indicates that placed immediately after Judges in the Christian ness of Boaz and Ruth. Naomi’s acceptance at the Elimelekh’s flight was motivated by miserliness or canon. Whereas Judges describes an Israelite so- end of the book is the inversion of her alienation at abdication of social responsibility. The most plau- ciety plagued by anarchy, godlessness, and self- the beginning. (In the literary terminology enthusi- sible reading of his flight to Moab is simply that he centeredness, Ruth offers a way out, a recipe for astically adapted by the Gush school, the relation- was fleeing a famine. overcoming dissolution and building toward a co- ship between these two chapters is chiastic.) Ziegler suggests that in their disapproval of hesive and godly society. Ziegler supports this thesis Like commentators before her, Ziegler pays Elimelekh, the sages are reflecting on his choice to by drawing a series of linguistic and thematic par- close attention to the names and epithets used in relocate to Moab. When earlier biblical figures leave allels between the book of Ruth and other biblical Ruth. An embittered Naomi (whose name means Israel in times of famine it is always for Egypt, where books, particularly Genesis and Judges. sweet) asks to be called Mara (bitter); the name of one can always count on the Nile’s waters, not Moab, In Genesis, Abraham and his nephew Lot part the redeemer who refuses to propagate the name whose climate is like Israel’s. Moreover, Moab is the ways. Abraham becomes the bearer of God’s cov- and legacy of Ruth’s dead husband is named Ploni land of Sodom’s heirs. And to turn to Moab is, mor- enant, calling out in God’s name and paving the way Almoni, the biblical equivalent of John Doe, and so ally speaking, to follow Lot. The sages thus con- for a just and righteous society. Lot moves to So- on. On the other hand, there are subtleties that can nect Elimelekh’s relocation with the book’s broader dom and, upon its destruction, continues its legacy easily be missed: Ruth herself is variously referred theme of return from the path of Lot to the path of by siring, through his own daughters, Ammon and to as a Moabite girl, a daughter (by Naomi and by Abraham. Moab, tribes that are later deemed unfit to inter- Boaz), Naomi’s daughter-in-law, and a virtuous Ziegler never mentions current events, yet it is marry with Israelites on account of their refusal to woman. Ziegler carefully shows how these differ- clear that she intends her book to be read with an eye offer the Israelites bread and water during their des- ent descriptions indicate how Ruth is perceived by on contemporary Israeli society. Questions of selfish- ert sojourn (Deut. 23:4–5). In the era of the Judges, others and how those perceptions change through- ness and tribalism, treatment of proselytes and immi- however, Israelite society is itself inhospitable, xe- out the book. grants, cohesiveness and social responsibility, leader- nophobic, promiscuous, and violent—downright Ziegler points out two instances where the book ship and exploitation are once again relevant in this Sodom-like. Ruth leads Israelite society in the op- itself registers surprise at fortuitous coincidences. old-new land, and its people are once again turning posite direction. As Zeigler writes: When Boaz happens to visit the field where Ruth to Tanakh for moral insight. Ruth: From Alienation to is gleaning, and when Ploni happens to pass by the Monarchy shows how literarily and morally rich the Ruth’s journey to Bethlehem is indeed a “return”; city gate when Boaz wishes to arrange for Ruth’s re- biblical book of Ruth is, undercutting all attempts to it represents the closing of the circle begun with demption, the text employs the word “Hinei”—“Lo reduce it to an apologetic attempt to domesticate nas- Lot’s abandonment of Abraham in Genesis 13. and behold!”—suggesting a literal deus ex machina. ty rumors about King David’s lineage, mere polem- That event leads to the creation of the nations of For Ziegler it is significant that these examples of ics against xenophobia, or “mere” anything else. Yael Ammon and Moab, the spiritual heirs of Sodom, indirect divine intervention are both in response to Ziegler has written a commentary that exemplifies who are steeped in cruelty and immorality. Lot’s generous human initiatives, namely, Ruth’s offer to the unique combination of literary analysis, theol- descendant, Ruth the Moabite, returns to the path glean on Naomi’s behalf and Boaz’s offer to ensure ogy, and loyalty to rabbinic tradition of the new Gush of Abraham and becomes a paradigm of hesed Ruth’s redemption. In the socio-religious economy method of Bible study. [kindness] and modesty . . . She accomplishes of Ruth, God’s bounty is bestowed through human much more than that. Ruth produces the Davidic kindness rather than divine miracles, that is, by hu- dynasty, which is the vehicle for the nation’s mans acting in a godly manner. Elli Fischer is a rabbi, writer, and translator in Modi’in, return to the path of Abraham. Following Medan, Ziegler takes midrash seri- Israel.

A View from Reservoir Hill

BY DANIEL COTZIN BURG

live in Baltimore, in a neighborhood that was 93-year-old building. Beth Am tries to deepen the made headlines last month, but we are close. The once the Old Jewish Neighborhood but aspires connections between our members and our most- shocking death of Freddie Gray after his short trip to become the New Jewish Neighborhood. ly non-Jewish, African-American neighbors. Last down nearby streets in a police van on April 12 Now called Reservoir Hill, it unites what used year, in January, we packed over 350 people into our hit many of us quite hard. Aftershul , on Shabbat Ito be two communities: Eutaw Place, the grand social hall to hear and dance to the rhythms of a ter- morning April 25, I joined some members of the boulevard with its elegant town homes, and Lake rific, eclectic jazz band called the Afro-Semitic Ex- congregation to walk one mile west and meet up Drive, which included several blocks east of Eutaw perience. On Sukkot, near our community’s urban with Jews United for Justice and our black neigh- with more modest row houses. African-Americans farm, we cosponsored a greens-and-kugel cook-off bors. Together we marched through the streets of have for decades constituted the large majority of and ecumenical lulav and etrog demonstrations. west Baltimore, picking up additional protestors the neighborhood’s inhabitants, but in recent years Such events may not repair the world, but they are, along the way. Eventually our group and others Reservoir Hill has become an increasingly diverse at least, acts of tikkun shechuna—they repair the converged on City Hall. By the time I got back to community, a rarity in Baltimore, one that includes neighborhood, softening boundaries, and, perhaps Reservoir Hill, I had walked about seven miles more and more Jewish families. in some small way, restoring bonds that were bro- and, even though I knew that I was a far cry from For the past five years, I have served as rabbi ken or strained decades ago. Selma in 1965, I thought of Heschel and felt like of Beth Am Synagogue, a 40-year-old shul in a Our synagogue isn’t in the neighborhood that my “legs were praying.”

38 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 Two days later, however, it was less the civil whites in general as their enemy, nor were they tar- covered in plastic. One section was right next to a rights marches of the 1960s that were on our minds geting homes or individuals. Our residential neigh- car that had been burned, and the plastic had melt- than the urban riots of that decade. Measured by borhood was untouched by the events of that night. ed onto the produce. We ripped out the damaged the standards of the Baltimore riots of 1968, what For the fact that there was no loss of life on April crops and replaced the plastic. happened this year was pretty tame. But that wasn’t 27 the Baltimore police—not exactly heroes of the On Tuesday evening, a few of us drove over to clear from the outset, and many people were fright- moment—deserve a lot of credit. While I have deep join hundreds of other clergy and thousands of wor- shipers at Empowerment Temple Church. When It reminded me how rarely I have to preside over the we arrived, they were reaching the end of a lengthy session of testimonials offered by young black men funeral of a child or teenager and how often African- who had been harassed by police or by the parents of kids who had been brutalized or killed. It was an- American clergymen do. other reminder to me of how rarely I have to preside over the funeral of a child or teenager and how often ened when things heated up on April 27. Others misgivings about some police practices, I believe African-American clergymen who live nearby have were more frustrated and angry than afraid. I saw that we owe a debt of gratitude to these men and to do so. early evidence of this when I got into a conversation women who behaved with restraint in the face of On Shabbat morning, May 2, we had a good with my African-American neighbor Brandon, who great provocation. Properties can be revived from crowd in shul, including many members who don’t runs a junk delivery business, soon after teenagers the ashes. People cannot. typically come but who are proud of their urban began to square off with the police. I had been out- The looters and rioters on Monday night were congregation and wished to show solidarity. I spoke side, watching the helicopters circle overhead, when far fewer in number than the thousands who came about showing up, about how important it was not he pulled up to the curb in his truck. The junkyard, out on Tuesday morning to clean up the damage. just to be for and of our neighborhood, but to be he told me, had closed early on account of the un- My wife and I saw this for ourselves when we de- fully present in it. After the sermon we walked out- rest. His truck was full because he couldn’t drop off cided to postpone taking our kids to school and to side and davened on the steps of the shul. It was a his load, which meant he wouldn’t be able to do his go first to nearby Sandtown to join scores of other sunny, breezy day and it was good to sing and pray, scheduled pickups the next day. “I’m gonna lose a volunteers to clean up. We were young and old, lo- wrapped in our talleisim, less than a mile from few hundreds dollars because of those stupid kids,” cal residents and others, black, white, and brown, Mondawmin Mall where the rioting had first bro- he complained. “I can’t afford that!” wielding push brooms and garbage bags. At one ken out. Somebody walking by said “It’s a beautiful Baltimore as a whole lost millions that night, as point, a group of us stopped in front of a looted thing. We need all the music we can get out here.” over two hundred businesses were looted and large corner store and prayed. “This is not a time to tear inventories were burned. But no lives were lost, down; it’s a time to build up,” I said, paraphrasing and we shouldn’t lose perspective. It was not a race Kohelet. What our group was trying to rebuild there Daniel Cotzin Burg is the rabbi of Beth Am Synagogue in riot. The perpetrators of violence didn’t seem to see was a large urban farm with rows of hoop houses Baltimore.

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TheJewish Week | March 13, 2015

New York’s favorite Jewish newspaper 6 t h A N N u A L Kosher Winee d i t i O N

New Birthright IYYAR 5775 Alum Program May 8, 2015 • 19 Award-winning coverage of local, national and In The Works YOURS FREE MANHATTAN • $1.00 WITH PAID New Art Restitution Guide international news and features of Jewish interest. Effort Fueled By 2 YEAR What’s next after NEXT folds? N.Y. 9 Return Of Work is The Kosher Labe Nazi-looted painting given back to Ethiopians Fight a ‘GoLden L ORDER!! Entrenched Bias Jewish family; lawyers pressing D.C. bill. handcuff?’ israeLi vinTners Stewart Ain discuss The benefi Staff Writer Ts An inside guide to The Arts, including theater, and piTfaLLs of Typecas he return this TinG w e e k o f a paGe 4 T17th-century Decades of frustration oil painting to the The Terrain - in boil over in Tel Aviv daughter of a Ger The moun spain films, music, galleries, books and more. Medical clown Smadar Harpats getsPHOTOS a smile BY NATHAN from JEFFAY/JW an injured Tain vi protest. man art historian LLaG Israel 24 Nepalese boy at IDF field hospital. - of capçanes is e from whom the Na Attorneys Markus Stoetzel, right, andof an un The siTe zis stole it is fueling Mel Urbach, center, with state official- Li Reconciling With Mom KeLy Kosher efforts to revitalize Benjamin Lawsky stand beside “PaintWine success s At IDF Hospital COURTESY OF MEL URBACH campaigns against ing of a Man.” Tory museums and coun- paGe 10 The french COLUMNS LIKE: In Nepal, Healing tries that steadfastly refuse to return Nazi-looted art. Federal legislation will be sought to strip museums of their fiGhT bac Whi K And Heartbreak right to dismiss claims for the Nazi-looted art they hold by Le israeLi W arguing that the statute of limitations for the restitution of such domina ines Alice Eve Cohen’s Israel’s 150-strong medical staff seen as art has expired, according to two lawyers who specialize in Te The Kosher A N.Y. Minute, Back of the Book the Match Up, Philanthropy Watch. marK memoir, ‘The Year My lifesaver amid the rubble. Holocaust restitution. - eT, french W Mother Came Back.’ During a ceremony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in are s ines 29 Nathan Jeffay TarTin Arts Lower Manhattan celebrating the return of the painting, “Por G To Contributing Editor maKe a comebac trait of a Man,” state officials also announcedContinued the creation on page of 18 an save!K Nostalgia on online art gallery to help in the save! the Danube athmandu, Nepal — An paGe 24 REGULAR FEATURES SECTIONS INCLUDE: in Ruse, Bulgaria. 18-year-old lies on a Kbed at the entrance of a Leaving The Fold, tent, with an injured head and just a stub where his right arm Onto The Bookshelf used to be. “When I saw him I PLuS The Healthcare, Education, Spring and Fall Arts, thought he was dead,” said his Growing literary genre of ex-Orthodox father, Bim Mahi. testing traditional narrative of insular Nearby, there’s a new baby communities. Top 18 ADL’s Foxman Li 36 The 18 BesT Kosher STWines...S Travel on Nepal and 23 Sandee Brawarsky 36 Under 36, Israel Now, Celebrate!, Jewish Journeys, Israeli policies. Bika Rana, a 25-year-old - Culture Editor WhiT Nepalese soldier, is recover es $18 &o 22 Opinion Nepal rabbi’s ver Whi 26 ing well from a leg injury. hulem Deen was a man in reds $25 & Tes under $18 Arts Guide grim task. his 20s when he felt bold % 34 4over reds 4 % enough to slip unseen bes 4under4 $25 37 Sabbath S T reds and Whi in an incubator, a woman clinging to life in the intensive care unit,into a public library. Like the Kosher Wine Guide, The Good Life and more inner-city Af- Tes a soldier praying in the synagogue, and a triage full of Nepalese sW - eeT Wines who are flocking here based on word-of-mouth reports about the Arts rican-Amer israeLi Wines treatment on offer. And Culture ican boy in besT Wines - - It’s just a normal day at Israel’s fieldreeling hospital after a in 7.8-magni Nepal, still Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Co tude earthquake rocked lumbus” who, on a visit to the the country on April 25; Newark Public Library, first the death toll now stands sees Gauguin’s striking paint- at more than 7,500. ings of exotic Tahiti, a world Newest chapter: Shulem One of the first faces New York’s best newspaper for the news and information you cracked open for Deen. Deen’s memoir deepens a - that many of the patients EARL GABEL - On a tiny chair in the chil literary trend. see here is that of Avi Alp Continued on page 32 ORDER NOW can’t get elsewhere, including Jewish single events, travel and Continued on page 26 52 ISSUES vacations, unique classified ads and our weekly Arts Guide SAVINGS VOUCHER FOR JUST on what’s happening around the City. Savings Offer* $29! 1 year / 52 issues / $29.00 / SAVE 44% FOR FASTER SERVICE CALL 212-921-7822, ext. 230 2 years / 104 issues / $55.00 / SAVE 47% Please complete the form below and return with savings voucher (at right) and send to: The Jewish Week, 1501 Broadway, Suite 505, New York, NY 10036 Payment Method Check enclosed Discover Card Visa MasterCard Amex Bill me later NAME

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Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 39 The Arts The Great Gaon of Italian Art

BY Elliott Horowitz

his first book, Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, “very full of pleasant memories . . . of cypresses and Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade to great effect. (Later, in his essay on “The Moses of pines and views, and still more of our talks.” by Rachel Cohen Michelangelo,” Freud would remark that this meth- Such talks, whether at I Tatti or at Berenson’s Yale University Press, 344 pp., $25 od of focusing on seemingly incidental details was summer residence in Vallombrosa, also made a “closely related to . . . psycho-analysis.”) strong impression on Isaiah Berlin, whose first visit Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage Shortly after the publication of Venetian Paint- occurred shortly before that of the Bouvier sisters— edited by Joseph Connors and Louis A. Waldman ers, Berenson helped Isabella Gardner acquire Bot- but unlike theirs is not noted by Rachel Cohen. Harvard University Press, 440 pp., $40 ticelli’s The Tragedy of Lucretia, a picture that, as In September of 1950, Berlin thanked him for the Cohen aptly comments, “would turn out to be of “unbroken delight” of his recent visit, gratefully ac- great significance to Gardner’s collection, to Beren- knowledging that he “went away, my head in a great In memory of Ezra Mendelsohn, historian and son’s career, and to the annals of American collect- whirl with all the ideas, images, glimpses of persons humanist ing.” Two years later, he helped Mrs. Gardner ac- & relationships, forms of life which . . . you scatter quire Velasquez’s portrait of Philip IV for $73,000, with so prodigal & unreckoning a hand.” Later de- prompting Mary Costelloe to write her sister Alys scribing the same visit to a friend, the Oxford phi- that “Berenson has made a lot of money and I have losopher was less effusive, writing of his aged host t is only by a study of Jewish institu- helped in it.” The substantial fees acquired through that his brain was still “very clear, his eye very sharp, tions and literature that we shall begin such transactions helped Bernard and Mary first to his sentiments malicious.” Berlin continued: “To to understand the puzzling character of rent and then eventually purchase the palatial Villa like him is difficult, perhaps even to respect him, the Jews.” These words appear early in but in a curious way one can be fasci- an“I 1888 essay on “Contemporary Jewish Fiction” nated by so much controlled rational by the former Jew and recent Harvard graduate self-love . . . I went away with a slightly Bernhard Berenson (he soon dropped the German- creepy feeling but not undisposed to see ic “h”) in The Andover Review. The essay’s preco- him again.” Indeed, less than three years cious author, who had arrived with his family from later, in May of 1953, he reported to Ar- Lithuania only 13 years before, studiously avoided thur Schlesinger that he had seen “old any suggestion that he himself had been born and Berenson in Florence, and I must say I raised among those “puzzling” people. Their “char- am continually impressed.” acter and interests,” he wrote, “are too vitally opposed to our own to permit the existence of that I know all that is said against him intelligent sympathy between us and them which is as an old, cunning, foxy humbug, necessary for comprehension.” Berenson (né Valv- his snobbery, his artificiality, his rojenski) had, in fact, converted to Christianity just heartlessness etc. On the other hand, three years earlier, in the fall of his second year at he is a man of extreme intelligence, Harvard. In the essay, composed in Italy shortly af- of enormous intellectual liveliness, ter his graduation, he gave his place of residence as who really does . . . make one think Florence. During the 1890s, he would return to Italy about subjects one by one with great with his mistress (and future wife) Mary Costel- rapidity and brightness. loe, convert again—from Protestantism to Catholi- cism—and establish his legendary home of the next After reading these mercurial mis- six decades outside of Florence, Villa I Tatti. sives, all to be found in the second of Although Berenson had failed to win Harvard’s three recently published volumes of prestigious Parker Traveling Fellowship, he had set Berlin’s letters, it is disconcerting not out for Europe in June of 1887 nonetheless, with the to find their author’s name in the index same $700 awarded to Parker fellows, provided, in to Cohen’s new biography. This is par- this case, by a group of Boston benefactors, one of ticularly unfortunate, as Berlin’s letters whom was his future friend and client Isabella Stew- to and about Berenson shed consider- art Gardner. It was in his second year in Europe that able light on the latter’s sense of his Berenson developed the expertise in Renaissance own Jewishness during his final decade. art that eventually gained him enormous wealth as Writing to Nicky Mariano, Berenson’s one of the world’s leading experts in the attribution long-time assistant (and sometime mis- of paintings. His technique was derived largely from tress), shortly after his death in 1959, that of the Italian scholar Giovanni Morelli, whom Mary and Bernard Berenson, 1901. (Biblioteca Berenson, Villa Berlin reported that “on the last two oc- I Tatti—The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Berenson met late in the latter’s life. As Rachel Co- casions that I saw him he talked, when Studies, courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.) hen notes in her new book on Berenson’s “life in the we were alone, at immense length about picture trade,” Morelli’s method was based on the the Jews and his attitude towards them.” belief “that every artist has signature ways of doing I Tatti, which over the years attracted a variety of Berlin, who was born in Riga, noted that Berenson small details—drapery, hands, ears—and that dis- guests ranging from Alys’ husband Bertrand Russell, regarded him “as someone who, having come from tinguishing these traits made a firmer basis for au- who began writing “A Free Man’s Worship” there, to Eastern Europe and settled in the West, was able thentication.” Berenson’s teacher Charles Eliot Nor- the Bouvier sisters (the future Jackie Kennedy and to understand the particular synthesis which he ton dismissively dubbed this the “ear and toenail Lee Radziwill), who came in 1951. In 1903, Russell represented.” school,” but Berenson employed the technique in wrote to his brother-in-law that his mind was still Berenson’s 1888 essay, which combined deep

40 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 immersion in the Jewish authors of his native East- the works he would soon discuss in “Contemporary he last two sentences quoted illustrate the ern Europe with what Cohen aptly calls a “strangely Jewish Fiction.” Taptness of Joseph Connors’ assertion, in the self-alienated” voice, was one of his first steps, intel- This ambivalence could sometimes express itself introduction to his co-edited volume Bernard Be- lectually as well as psychologically, toward that “par- in what David Rosand called Berenson’s “accom- renson: Formation and Heritage, that Samuels’ bi- ticular synthesis.” That essay, which she misleadingly modating anti-Semitism.” Rosand cited a letter to ography “is beautifully written.” Connors, an art describes as a “thoroughgoing survey of recent Yid- Isabella Gardner, written during the year of Euro- historian at Harvard who for some years headed dish literature,” actually dealt more thoroughly with pean travel she cosponsored, in which Berenson de- its Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at I Tatti such Hebrew writers as Abraham Mapu and Peretz scribed a train trip to Vienna “with Jews and other (Berenson left the well-appointed villa, together Smolenskin. Although it was composed during his indecencies.” In another, he sneeringly described with its magnificent library and art collection, to European Wanderjahr, the extensive reading upon swaying men praying in a Berlin synagogue as pre- his alma mater), noted no less aptly that “Samuels’s which it was based must have begun, as his earlier sumably engaged also in “selling old clothes” to each work will long be the basis of scholarship about Be- (and still best) biographer Ernest Samuels noted, other. Gardner might well have asked herself what renson and his world.” Somewhat less accurately, during Berenson’s boyhood. however, he predicted that “there will be a sensitive Indeed, in her unpublished treatment of Berenson’s ambiguous relationship autobiography Mary Costel- to his Jewish roots in a forthcoming biography by loe recalled her first impres- Rachel Cohen in the series Jewish Lives.” Unfor- sions of her future husband tunately, although no less elegantly written than during that year, as a “beau- Samuels’ more substantial work, Cohen’s book is tiful and mysterious youth,” not a successful discussion of this most perplexing who had “behind him the of “Jewish lives.” culture of a precocious little Cohen herself describes her slim biography as Jewish boy, who had lived for “more distillation than excavation,” explaining that ten years in Lithuania.” it “focuses on a handful of relationships that allow The “strangely self- Berenson to be seen in the round.” That “handful,” alienated” voice in Beren- moreover, includes six relationships with women son’s essay is also evident in and only one with a man. The latter, in keeping a letter he wrote earlier that with Cohen’s title, is the crafty (and sometimes year from England to his crooked) art dealer Joseph Duveen, whose sales sister Senda in Boston. The of expensive European paintings to such clients as letter is transcribed some- Isabella Gardner and J.P. Morgan were often bol- what differently by Cohen stered by Berenson’s authentications. The women than by Samuels, whose ver- upon whom Cohen focuses, beyond Isabella Stew- sion appears below: art Gardner, are Berenson’s sister Senda (herself a remarkable figure), his wife Mary, his assistant/ Yesterday I received a Bernard Berenson at the Borghese Gallery, Rome, 1955. (© David Seymour/ mistress Nicky Mariano, the partly (and secretly) pile of Jewish books and Magnum Photos.) African-American Bella da Costa Greene, who merely to look them over was J.P. Morgan’s librarian and Berenson’s lover, made me sick to fainting. and the blue-blooded writer and fellow expatriate I made up my mind Edith Wharton. These relationships—with the ex- then and there to toy no ception of that with his sister Senda—are hardly more with things Jewish the ones through which to best explore Berenson’s or Oriental . . . If I had a Jewish identity. The suspicion arises that they were boy to educate he should chosen by Cohen largely on the basis of recent bi- never learn Sanskrit, ographies from which they could conveniently be Hebrew, Assyrian, or distilled: Meryle Secrest’s Duveen: A Life in Art any of those barbarous (2005), Heidi Ardizzone’s An Illuminated Life: jargons. He should know Bella da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to the Classics and his Privilege (2007), Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton English [literature] by (2007), and Ralph Melnick’s Senda Berenson: The heart. Unlikely Founder of Women’s Basketball (2007). Had Cohen truly been interested in pursuing Be- Cohen’s version strangely renson’s “ambiguous relationship to his Jewish roots,” places the first sentence at Isaiah Berlin would not have been absent from Co- the end and has Berenson hen’s biography. And instead of—or along with— deciding to “toy no more Bella da Costa Greene she might have devoted more with things Jewish and Ori- attention to another woman, Aline Sassoon (née ental.” Neither biographer, Rothschild), who first met Berenson in St. Moritz however, pointed to the during the summer of 1904, and later introduced punning reference—which A detail from The Tragedy of Lucretia by Sandro Botticelli, ca. 1500. him to Duveen. As the historian Peter Stansky has (Courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.) Senda would have under- noted, there are some 50 letters from Aline to Be- stood—to Crawford Howell renson in the archives at I Tatti. When Berenson first Toy (1836–1919), Harvard’s Hancock Professor of brought a baptized Jew to enter that Berlin syna- met Aline he had been married for some four years Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages, with whom gogue in the first place. As Samuels observed early to Mary, who followed the friendship quite closely. Berenson had studied Arabic. He had also studied in the first volume of his biography, published in Writing to her sister-in-law Senda from London in Sanskrit, and if he had not studied Assyrian, he did 1979, Berenson “would never quite lose the traces 1906 she passed on the rumor that Berenson had, take “advanced Hebrew” (as well as Aramaic) with of Jewish self-hatred.” Samuels added that the young since his arrival, “lunched or dined—sometimes the Assyriologist David Lyon, who had earlier been Harvard graduate still “had much more to learn of both—with Lady Sassoon fourteen days out of the a student of Toy (and to both of whom we shall re- the subtle ramifications of anti-Semitism, against sixteen.” Stansky suggests that Aline “may well have turn). The “pile of Jewish books” that made Beren- which the garment of Christianity which he had put been the most important woman in Berenson’s life, son “sick to fainting” presumably included many of on would not protect him.” although he treated her with some disdain.”

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 41 Could Berenson’s disdain for Aline, together ancestors.” Yet, he added somewhat spitefully, “theirs and bitterly attacked the national feelings they with his apparent strong attraction to her, be related was an act of courageous conviction, while for him inspired in others. to their shared Jewish roots? In a 1904 letter from the change of religion was a short-lived conversion St. Moritz, Berenson complained to Isabella Stewart that helped to accommodate him to a higher social Berlin went on to question Schapiro’s assumption Gardner about having “to put up with pis aller [the milieu.” Although his dismissal of Berenson’s conver- that the motive behind Berenson’s conversions had last choice] like Lady Sassoon.” He was clearly learn- sions as “short-lived” was perhaps mean-spirited, it been “desire for social ease and advancement,” assert- ing to ape the genteel anti-Semitism of the English also amounted to recognizing the late sage of I Tatti ing that anyone “who did not know him intimately” upper classes. Two years later John Maynard Keynes as a fellow Jew. Indeed, Schapiro, who was himself a would hardly be “in a position to judge.” Schapiro, wrote from I Tatti to his friend (and sometime lover) Lithuanian Jew who knew that Berenson stemmed with equal nobility, urged Berlin to publish his let- Lytton Strachey that upon arriving he had missed from the same region as the Vilna Gaon, went on to ter, adding that “any future biographer will have to Berenson, who “had gone off in a motor car to flirt assert: “One might say of him, from a Jewish point take your judgment into account.” When Samuels with a foul woman called Lady Sassoon.” of view, that in establishing the canon of authentic composed his two-volume biography this exchange works of the Renaissance masters, he made himself had not yet been published, but in 2004 the let- ohen mentions the Oxford historian Hugh the great Gaon of the heritage of Italian art.” He also ters—as Stuart Schoffman helpfully reminded me— CTrevor-Roper, alongside Ernest Hemingway remembered having spied “on the fly-leaf on a Latin appeared in the arts journal The Brooklyn Rail.Now and Walter Lippmann, as one of Berenson’s cor- school-text his youthful signature in large stiff letters, that Cohen has not utilized them either, it may in- respondents during his later years, but is clear- and beneath it the date according to the Jewish calen- deed still be said that any future biographer of Be- ly unaware of the excellent edition by Richard dar in a most delicate minute Hebrew.” renson’s will have to take into account Berlin’s 1961 Davenport-Hines of Trevor-Roper’s letters, over 12 Berenson’s continuing, if contradictory, connec- letter—as well as his earlier ones. years, to his older friend. These, too, are relevant tion to his Jewish roots was at the center of a little- to Berenson’s Jewish sensibilities. In a letter from known exchange of letters between Berlin and Scha- t would also be wise for a future biographer to 1955, for example, Trevor-Roper mentions that piro. Berlin had felt “impelled” to publicly respond Iexamine Berenson’s undergraduate experience Berenson had brought to his attention the auto- to Schapiro’s essay, but first sent a draft to Schapiro, at Harvard a bit more closely. Like Berenson’s pre- biography of the 18th-century Jewish philosopher explaining: “I owe something to the memory of my vious biographers, Cohen notes that he studied Solomon Maimon with whom Berenson had good friend B.B., but not anything that might in any way Arabic with the southern scholar Crawford Toy, reason to identify (among other things, Maimon upset or annoy yourself, with whom my friendship is who warmly recommended him for the Parker was from Lithuania and had toyed with the pos- far deeper.” In his—ultimately unpublished—letter to traveling fellowship to no avail. Cohen, like some sibility of an expedient conversion). Eastern Eu- Encounter, Berlin described Berenson’s “ironical and of those biographers, also suggests that Charles El- ropean Jewish autobiographies were, in fact, a deeply civilised intelligence” before proceeding to the iot Norton’s apparently influential refusal to write continuing interest of Berenson’s. Nicky Mariano, “difficult” matter of “his attitude to the Jews.” on Berenson’s behalf may have been motivated by who knew him for some 40 years, recalled that Be- anti-Semitism, but provides no real evidence. It renson’s “love of things Russian included transla- Like [Heinrich] Heine (with whom he felt an may be noted, however, that in 1869 Norton wrote tions from Yiddish,” citing such works as Memoirs affinity) and perhaps Marx . . . he broke away to a female relative in Boston observing that in of a Grandmother by Pauline Wengeroff and the from his East European Jewish milieu early in England “the Jews have it all their own way, and first two volumes of Shemaryahu Levin’s autobio- life, and was clearly in his youth determined to . . . are uppermost in this land.” Toy, by contrast, graphical trilogy. Melnick, in his biography of Sen- place the maximum distance between himself went out of his way to write, in his book Judaism da Berenson, cites her brother’s recommendation, and the detested Pale of Settlement; he probably and Christianity, that “neither in the early centu- in a 1930 letter, that she read Levin’s first volume: felt at one time that he had succeeded in this, ries nor in the Middle Age[s] nor in our times [em- “but for insignificant differences, it could pass for but towards the end of his life this goal seemed phasis added] is it possible to discover any marked the story of our own childhood.” Some of Beren- to him at once less attainable and less desirable. ethical difference between Jews and Gentiles.” son’s previous biographers have noted that when I do not think that he was embarrassed by “Shylock and Antonio are on a par in this regard,” he later encountered Chaim Weizmann’s Trial and his origins; but he had revolted against them, he wrote in that 1890 work. This may help account Error he remarked of the first chapter, describing Weizmann’s childhood in Belarus: “It was just like that.” Cohen, however, makes no mention of these autobiographies. The American art historian Meyer Schapiro is another one of Cohen’s significant omissions. Cohen briefly mentions Schapiro among Berenson’s many correspondents, but ignores his controversial essay “Mr. Berenson’s Values.” That 1961 essay, which Jo- seph Connors imprecisely calls “a thoroughly negative obituary,” is, in fact, neither “thoroughly negative” nor an obituary (Berenson died in 1959), but a response rather to the 1960 biography by the British journalist Sylvia Sprigge. In a letter written shortly after its appearance Isaiah Berlin tartly noted that he had read “only one chapter, in which I found no fewer than thirty-seven errors, seven howlers, and a great many inaccuracies.” Sprigge’s biography was hardly more objective than Berenson’s own 1949 Sketch for a Self-Portrait. Schapiro, who had first visited Berenson during the 1920s, reviewed his autobiographical work in Commentary. In the 1961 essay, which originally appeared in the British journal Encounter, Schapiro returned to Berenson’s autobiography, perceptively noting the author’s frequent references to Paul and Spinoza, “two deeply dedicated and uncompromising The terrace steps at Villa I Tatti, near Florence. (Photo by Frances Benjamin Johnston, courtesy of the Library Jews who, like himself, broke with the religion of their of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)

42 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 for Berenson’s continuing relationship with Toy, some two decades earlier, when he traveled with with whom he met periodically in Europe. both Mary and Nicky Mariano to “Syria and Pales- Unlike earlier biographers, however, Cohen tine.” At Nablus, Nicky later reported, makes no mention of Berenson’s other instruc- tor in Semitic languages, David Gordon Lyon. The Mary noticed a line of people climbing up like Alabama-born Lyon had studied Hebrew with Toy ants toward the top of the mountain . . . and at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, be- wondered what they were up to. Suddenly fore eventually becoming Harvard’s first Assyriolo- B.B. became interested. “To-day is the Jewish gist. In contrast to Toy, who became a Unitarian at Passover” he said, and in this place there must Harvard, Lyon remained a staunch but enlightened be still a small community of Samaritans who In a 1951 letter, Berenson worried about “rabbinical zealots,” predicting that “if they get the upper hand Israel will become a mere Yeshiba supporting drones who shake backward and forward mumbling prayers like Tibetan Lamas.”

Baptist. His diary for 1885, preserved at Harvard, celebrate it in the ancient way by sacrificing a records that on the second day of January the uni- lamb on top of Mount Gerizim. versity’s president, Charles William Eliot (a cousin of Norton’s), requested that he “conduct prayers.” Later, at dinner in town they sat near an English mis- Although Lyon consented, he noted that “the stu- sionary couple and “B.B. jumped to the conclusion that dents are so opposed to compulsory observance.” they had been watching the Passover feast on Mount In January of 1885 Berenson—still a Jew but Gerizim and started to ask them about it.” Berenson Memory is Our Home probably not exempt from morning chapel—began was probably intrigued by the Samaritans because they Loss and Remembering: Three Generations in the second semester of his freshman year and was were, like himself, Jews outside Jewish tradition. one of six students enrolled in Lyon’s course in Syr- Poland and Russia 1917-1960s iac (Christian Aramaic). One wonders whether his s Nicky Mariano noted in her 1966 memoir, SUZANNA EIBUSZYC relationship with Lyon played a role in Berenson’s A“B.B was not a Zionist in those days.” A powerful biographical memoir based on decision to convert several months later. It is also the diaries of Roma Talasiewicz-Eibuszyc, possible that he discussed the matter with Toy, who, He had to go through the Hitler years before who was born in Warsaw before the end of his admirable tolerance notwithstanding, wrote that he could feel a real sympathy with the heroic World War I. Christianity’s rise “out of Judaism is . . . in conformi- effort of the Israelite [sic] state builders. Only Translated by her own daughter, inter- ty with a well-defined law of human progress.” Lyon the danger of orthodox Jewry having the upper weaving her own recollections as her fam- also recommended Berenson for the Parker fellow- hand in Israel filled him with horror, and ily made a new life in the shadows of the ship, writing that although “he is still very young, became a sort of obsession with him during his Holocaust in Communist Poland after the which perhaps accounts for an apparent change in last years. war and into the late 1960s, this book is a the direction of his studies, from philological to lit- rich, living document, a riveting account erary,” he regarded him as “a man of unusual ability Indeed, in a 1951 letter to his cousin, the Ameri- of a vibrant young woman’s courage and endurance. and of brilliant promise.” Had the young Berenson can diplomat Robert Lawrence Berenson, who had decided to channel his abilities in a more philologi- just been in Jerusalem, Berenson worried about A forty-year recollection of love and loss, cal direction, he might have preceded Harry Aus- “rabbinical zealots,” predicting that “if they get the of hopes and dreams for a better world, it tryn Wolfson (1887–1974), another Lithuania-born upper hand Israel will become a mere Yeshiba sup- provides richly-textured accounts of the Jew and Harvard graduate, as the university’s first porting drones who shake backward and forward physical and emotional lives of Jews in Warsaw and of survival during World War II professor of Hebrew literature and philosophy. mumbling prayers like Tibetan Lamas.” throughout Russia. This book, narrated in a In September of 1948, Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote Although Berenson’s “brilliant promise” was re- compelling, unique voice through two gen- alized in the world of art rather than in literature to Berlin that he was “fascinated by the internal strug- erations, is the proverbial candle needed to or scholarship, he remained deeply interested, espe- gle in Palestine,” which reminded him of “revolution- keep memory alive. cially during his later years, in the relations between ary politics in Cromwell’s time,” but was reluctant Judaism and Christianity. In April of 1949, shortly to travel there, “as I have been condemned to death “This is a haunting and brave book, it will before Passover and Easter were to fall on the same by the Stern gang.” Berenson replied that “no people both move and educate readers.” day, he commented in his diary on the similarities reaches statehood except through blood & filth & ter- —Janice Eidus, award-winning author of between the Old and New Testaments, deriding ror,” adding somewhat more ambivalently that “now The War of the Rosens those who see the first as “so hard, brutal, legalistic, that the Jew is ready to dig the soil, fight & die, noth- and the second, the gospels particularly, so humane ing will stop him—unfortunately and unhappily.” “A most compelling and illuminating and even tender.” Such people forget “that both Old This was considerably different from Berenson’s memoir. In her straightforward style, the and New Testament are equally Hebrew, only that position some 11 years earlier, writing to Mary from author encompasses life in its totality. by the time of Jesus the Israelites had become Jews, Cyprus, where he had sailed with “several hundred It is highly recommended.” and that their pagan ways had softened and become German-speaking and ever so German-looking —Judy Weissenberg Cohen, editor of humanized.” Berenson continued with the follow- Jews,” on their way to “the land of their very remote Women and the Holocaust ing thought for the upcoming paschal holidays: “If and exceedingly putative fathers.” That encounter, as $30.00 · paper · ibidem Press only we realized how Jewish the New Testament well as recent events in Europe, gave him reason to was we should begin to realize how little there was rethink the nature of the Jews, who were, he observed in primitive Christianity that was not a product of in that 1937 letter, “neither a religion nor a nation nor COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS contemporary Jewish feeling and groping, and how a race any more, whatever they may have been at one CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU · CUPBLOG.ORG much it did to shape Christianity for all time.” time,” adding that he wished “one could define what Berenson’s consciousness, even as a nominal they are, and why they are so attractive and repel- Christian, of when Passover fell was already evident lent, repellent chiefly.” But Berenson, on his way to

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 43 Zionism, also began to think about his own Jewish it narrowly but said he’d have to look at it again.” themed banter quoted by Samuels in the first vol- self-hatred. “It is notorious,” he acknowledged to his Behrman impishly chose to call his chapter on ume of his biography, but Behrman’s amused (and diary in December of 1941, “that converted Jews are Berenson “Esrigs at I Tatti,” mimicking the latter’s amusing) account went on. Berenson insisted that apt to turn bitterly and ragingly anti-Semite.” Lithuanian pronunciation of the citron used on his “esrigs” met “every specification” of Jewish law, In that same entry from 1941 he noted “the fact Sukkot. One morning, while they were walking on and, implausibly, that he even sent them to Israel. first identified by [Heinrich] Heine, that a Jew to be the extensive grounds of his estate, Berenson sud- When Behrman admitted having once accidental- taken for silver must be of gold.” It is no coincidence ly broken the stem of his father’s “esrig,” Berenson, that he was identifying during those years with the who was clearly enjoying himself, exclaimed: “You 19th-century German writer, whose conversion to Cohen, however, has broke the pittim!” And when he admitted that his Christianity had been famously skin-deep. One of unfortunately gone a step father had been furious, the sage of I Tatti replied: Heine’s best-known poems had dealt with the 12th- “Justifiably. The pittim is the soul of the esrig. Also century poet and pilgrim Judah Halevi, and Beren- further, throwing out the probably a priapic symbol.” When Behrman, con- son began translating Halevi’s famous “Lament for tinuing their midrashic madness, noted that his Zion,” as he called it, on a sleepless summer night esrig with the pittim. interlocutor had said “nothing about the lulov,” in 1949. He sought “in vain for verbal equivalents presumably even more priapic than the citron, that would convey the rhythm of the quatrains, yet denly said: “My Jewishness is an essential part of Berenson replied in mock-scholarly fashion: “It carry the exact sense.” He had gone back to Hebrew me.” He then added, with characteristic irony: “We was carried in religious processions in the Minoan some seven years earlier. In a 1942 diary entry, later should be proud, you know, we Jews, of our greatest civilization.” As to why Jews added the “esrig” to posthumously published in his One Year’s Reading creation—Jesus Christ.” On his stroll with Behrman, the practice, his explanation was: “Because we are for Fun, he wrote that having returned “for the first however, it was not the New Testament that came a peculiar people.” time in all but sixty years to the Psalms in Hebrew,” up for Jewish discussion, but citrus fruit. Behrman Samuels understandably omitted the spirited he discovered to his “surprise and delight” that he thought that Berenson was growing lemons, but his discussion of priapic pittims from his two-volume “could read quite easily.” host insisted that they were “esrigs.” Berenson then biography, which illuminated—but did not focus Berenson was still working on Halevi’s Zion asked the Worcester native whether he had a “suka” upon—Berenson’s Jewishness. Cohen, however, has poem when he was visited by the famous Ameri- while growing up, to which the latter replied: “Of unfortunately gone a step further, throwing out the can playwright, journalist, and wit S.N. (Sam) course, my father built it in our yard.” That yard, Be- esrig with the pittim. She quotes only the early part Behrman. Behrman was writing a series of articles renson was surprised to learn, also had a pear tree, of that morning discussion with Behrman, which on Duveen, which appeared in The New Yorker prompting him to exclaim: “You must have been she may have taken directly from Samuels, while in 1951. Behrman, as he later wrote in his People very rich.” To Behrman’s question “didn’t you have omitting the rest, including Berenson’s concluding in a Diary, brought along “Edmund Wilson’s last a suka?” he memorably replied: “The ambiance of remark that “we are a peculiar people.” That first Christmas card, a gay little production” because the North Station in Boston where we were shunted person plural was the same he used when playfully he “wanted to show B. B. a poem of Wilson’s in when we arrived from Lithuania did not encourage proclaiming earlier that day: “We should be proud, Hebrew, dedicated to Isaiah Berlin.” Upon being pleasure domes.” you know, we Jews, of our greatest creation— presented with the poem Behrman’s host “gulped That was the last sentence from their Jewish- Jesus Christ.” During those years Berenson was ambivalently proud not only of the Jewish Jesus but also of the Jewish State. In his 1951 letter to his cousin Law- rence he not only addressed the dangers posed by “rabbinical zealots,” but also made prescient suggestions about military and foreign policy:

Israel must, in my opinion, first and foremost become the most powerful organization in the Near East. That alone will render the Jew the self-respect he suffers from lacking. That will procure him respect from OTHERS the world over and of his neighbors in particular. Then in good time Israel must conquer Transjordania, of which perfide Albion needlessly treacherously deprived it . . . With Trans-Jordania [sic] Israel could support millions and make her authority felt in Cairo as well as Baghdad and Damascus and be a state even ex-Great Britain would want to be allied with.

Berenson recognized that this was a “wild program” that “could be realised only with American money and American-Jewish pull” together with “the iron determination of the Israelis.” Although Cohen also omits this letter from her charming but limited biography, it may indeed serve as a key to Berenson’s heightened sense of his own Jewishness during his final decades, one that never ceased to be impishly ironic despite its increasing intensity.

Elliott Horowitz, author of Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, is currently an Oliver Smithies Visiting Fellow at Balliol College, University of Oxford.

44 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 An Al Schwimmer Production

BY steven pressfield

and others (not all of them Jews) came from Canada, Above And Beyond makes great use of archival foot- Above and Beyond Australia, England, New Zealand, South Africa. All age. When you see the scale of the armored columns produced by Nancy Spielberg, directed by in all, 190 machalniks came from around the world of the Egyptians and especially the Iraqis the pitifully Roberta Grossman (out of a total of around 3,500 volunteers for all ser- underequipped Israeli defenders faced, the extent of Playmount Productions, 85 minutes, $12.99 vices) to serve in the Israeli Air Force. the emergency becomes vividly real. Here’s Lou Lenart, describing how the fledgling Israeli Air Force acquired its first four fighter planes, y May 29 the Egyptian army had advanced to patched-together Messerschmitt-109s, called by Bwithin 17 miles of Tel Aviv. The four Czech Messerschmitts had been flown, in pieces, to hen the ancient Spartans sought Ekron airfield in Israel (today’s Tel Nof Airbase) to aid a friendly state in distress, This plane was the worst piece and hastily assembled. Lenart and a handful of they did not send troops or arms or pilots didn’t dare take the planes up, even to test money. Instead they dispatched one of crap I have ever flown. the guns, for fear that they’d be discovered by the man—aW general—whose role was to take command Arabs. of the ally’s forces, whip them into shape, and lead their Czech assemblers mezeks, “mules”: Suddenly, at three in the afternoon, Shimon Avi- them to victory. Thucydides tells us, for instance, in dan, commander of the Haganah troops holding off his History of the Peloponnesian War, how the Spar- This plane was the worst piece of crap I have the Egyptians, raced onto the base. He told Lenart tan commander Gylippus saved Syracuse from a ever flown. It had been cobbled together to get his planes into the air at once to attack the massive Athenian invasion and nearly ruined Ath- by the Czechs from mismatched parts left enemy. “There’s no alternative, Lou. If the Egyptians ens in the bargain. behind by the Nazis. The airframe was from a break through now, they’ll be in Tel Aviv tonight In early May of 1948, the yet-to-be-born state Messerschmitt-109 but the propeller and the and that’s the end of Israel.” of Israel was in desperate need of foreign allies. The engine came out of a Heinkel bomber. You can’t Lenart led the four-ship formation. “That was armies of five Arab nations—Egypt, Jordan, Syria, build a plane that way. But it was all we could the air force of Israel,” he says in the film. “These Lebanon, and Iraq—stood poised on its borders, get, so we took it. There’s a phrase in Hebrew, four people and four junk airplanes.” Lenart’s #3 was ready to invade the instant Israel declared its independence. Azzam Pasha, the Secretary General of the Arab League, made their intentions clear: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongo- lian massacres and the Crusades.” No Gylippus sailed to the Jewish state’s aid. The United States not only failed to dispatch assistance but also embargoed all shipments of arms to the Middle East. Adhering to the Neutrality Act of 1939, the FBI and State Department worked to prevent U.S. veterans of World War II from aiding Israel by donat- ing their military skills or services. Revocation of citizenship was among the penalties for any American arrested “serving under a foreign flag.” The Egyptian Air Force, meanwhile, possessed 50 brand-new Spitfires, the superb fighter plane that had won the Battle of Britain, donated by England. Israel had no fighter planes and no pilots with combat experience. Who, then, came to Isra- el’s aid? This is the subject of an extraordinary and stirring new documentary from producer Nancy Spielberg and director Roberta Grossman entitled Above and Beyond. Lou Lenart came. A Marine fighter pilot from From left, Lou Lenart, Gideon Lichtman, and Modi Alon in the documentary Above and Beyond. (Courtesy Los Angeles, Lou met a Haganah agent in New York of the International Film Circuit.) who sent him to Israel via Rome. He was joined in Rome by Coleman “Collie” Goldstein of Philadel- En brera—“No alternative.” That was us and Ezer Weizman, nephew of Chaim (Ezer dropped phia, a B-17 pilot who had been shot down over that was Israel. one “n”) and future chief of the IAF. Within minutes France in 1943 and had crossed the Pyrenees on Lenart’s tiny formation spotted the Egyptian col- foot to make his escape. On May 14, 1948, Prime Minister David Ben- umn, extending “as far as the eye can see, with tanks Leon Frankel came from St. Paul, Minnesota, a Gurion declared Israel’s independence, and five Arab and trucks and artillery.” torpedo-plane pilot who had won the Navy Cross armies immediately invaded. An Egyptian column for heroism. George Lichter came, a combat vet who crossed the border at Gaza and began its drive up This is the moment I was born for. I believe that. had flown P-47 Thunderbolts and P-51 Mustangs; the coast road to Tel Aviv. Kibbutzniks at Yad Mor- Behind us is Israel, the Jewish people hanging on Gideon Lichtman and Milt Rubenfeld and Harold dechai put up a heroic stand, with women fighting by a thread. Ahead of us is the enemy, advancing Livingston and Bob Vickman and Stan Andrews, in the trenches alongside the men, but were overrun. to destroy everything we love.

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 45 We attack. The guns malfunction; the bomb at 94,’” says producer Nancy Spielberg, “I thought, releases balk. I look right and left and see What a great story this is and why don’t I know any- nobody. Anti-aircraft fire is ferocious. Six thing about this! It had all the makings of a big pic- thousand Egyptians are putting up everything ture, a ‘Spielberg film.’ It had heart, it had adventure, mo•sa•ic they’ve got. Eddie Cohen, a wonderful, brave pilot /mo za’ ik/ from South Africa, must have run into too much of 1. of or pertaining to Moses or the laws, it. His plane doesn’t come faith, institutions, and writings back. I manage to put one attributed to him. 70-kilogram bomb onto a concentration of trucks 2. an artwork made of small pieces and troops in the town square of Ishdud and to of inlaid stone, tile, marble, glass, etc., fly a few “cloverleafs,” forming a patterned whole. strafing. Modi and Ezer do what they can. It’s a 3. a new web magazine mess. We straggle back advancing ideas, argument, to base, having inflicted and reasoned judgment in minimal damage. all areas of Jewish endeavor. But the psychological shock to the Egyptians is devastating. To be attacked from the air by Messerschmitt-109s with 1958 passport issued to Al Schwimmer, which he used on his official trips as the Star of David on the head of Israel Aerospace Industries. sides! For all the enemy knew, our four planes were the vanguard of hundreds more. intrigue, and a little bit of sex . . .” (Nancy is Steven’s sister.) She continues: That night the Haganah defenders hit the enemy from the flank. Israeli intelligence Most of the fly boys that we interviewed were not intercepts this dispatch from the Egyptian at all in touch with their Jewishness; it had gotten brigade commander to his superiors in Cairo: them nowhere: They had been beaten up walking home from school in an anti-Semitic environment We were heavily attacked by enemy aircraft and in the U.S. They couldn’t get jobs as pilots in we are scattering. commercial airlines. So, when, for various reasons, they found themselves embarking on this journey ith Israel’s present status as a major military to aid Israel—an illegal one, at that—they also Wpower in the Middle East, it is easy to forget unconsciously were embarking on a journey of how desperately poor Israel was in 1948—short of self-discovery and Jewish pride. food, armaments, everything. Some may have never learned that the nation’s population at its found- Harold Livingston describes arriving at Ekron air To read our recent editions, featuring ing was only 600,000, standing against more than base and encountering for the first time the warriors powerful essays on 50 million Arabs and that 6,000 men and women of the Haganah, men and women, fit and lean and (fully one percent of the population) died in Israel’s disciplined. “I remember coming into the hangar and fight to survive its birth. seeing all these people in uniform. These are Jews? the Modern Orthodox culture wars That the IAF had planes to fly was principally My cynicism vanished very rapidly, I’ll tell you that.” by Jack Wertheimer the achievement of a U.S. Air Force veteran named By the end of the War of Independence, home- Al Schwimmer. Schwimmer ducked and dodged grown pilots had been trained, and the Yanks and Israel’s ascendant Middle Eastern the FBI and the Treasury and State Departments Aussies, the Brits and Canadians and South Africans Jews and, virtually singlehandedly, acquired and refitted could shake hands with their counterparts and take by matti Friedman the aircraft that would become the fledgling IAF. their leave with honor. In the film, Leon Frankel de- (Schwimmer was eventually convicted under the scribes one moment that has remained with him: the Bible’s most complicated Neutrality Act and lost his U.S. citizenship; he stayed character in Israel and founded the Israeli aircraft industry. He Shortly before I left Israel I happened to be by atar hadari was pardoned by President Bill Clinton in 2001.) in Tel Aviv when [the ships] were bringing in With money donated by American Jews, Schwim- refugees from the death camps in Europe. I mer bought up World War II surplus planes, C-46s remember them getting down on their hands visit us at and C-69 Constellations and B-17s (a plane could be and knees and kissing the ground. I knew then www.mosaicmagazine.com acquired by a vet then for as little as $5,000), hired and there that that was the reason why I came. mechanics to make these aircraft flight-worthy, then, disguising them as civilian airliners of the fictional Above and Beyond is the Spielberg movie to see Lineas Areas de Panama, had them flown via Pana- this year. ma and Brazil to Casablanca, then to Rome, Czecho- slovakia, and on to Israel. ADVANCING JEWISH THOUGHT Schwimmer’s story was in fact the impetus for Steven Pressfield is the author of Gates of Fire, The War Above and Beyond. “When I first read the obituary of Art, and The Lion’s Gate, a non-fiction narrative of that hooked me, ‘Father of the Israeli Air Force dies the Six-Day War.

46 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 exchange Strange Journey: A Response to Shmuel Trigano

BY ETHAN B. KATZ AND MAUD S. MANDEL

n his “Journey Through French Anti-Semitism” the national community by linking French Jewish immigrant rhetoric; and the first headscarf contro- (Spring 2015), Shmuel Trigano paints a sober- citizens with Muslim immigrants, a construct from versy in 1989, which focused attention on Muslim ing portrait. According to his account, France which he maintains French Jews have never emerged. religious difference. Under these circumstances, Mus- has been careening toward an anti-Semitic cri- There are numerous problems with this analy- lim activists started to stress the deep structural biases Isis for some 30 years—an historical evolution he attri- sis. Certainly the founding of SOS Racisme marked against Muslims, while Jewish activists began to em- butes to the French left in the 1980s and the tradition- a dramatic turning point in Muslim-Jewish coop- phasize Jews’ long history in France and the ease of al teachings of Islam. The author claims, moreover, eration in France thanks to the joint efforts of the their integration compared to Muslims. In relatively that his own experience has repeatedly confirmed the French Jewish Students’ Union (UEJF) and numer- short order, then, the alliances forged in the early indifference of the French state and much of French ous prominent “Beur” activists (“beur” being the 1980s broke down with few of the enduring legacies society toward rising anti-Semitism. France, he ar- popular slang term for French-born Muslim citizens that Trigano claims. Indeed, his analysis ignores such gues, is far too uncritical of Islam and Muslims; the of immigrant parents). Working together to create critical developments as the refashioning of national future for French Jews looks decidedly bleak. a just and peaceful France, these activists put aside political culture by subsequent regimes, decades of We do not wish to trivialize Professor Triga- their differences—which emerged most often around structural inequities for French Muslims, and the no’s personal experiences. Moreover, we share his the Israeli-Arab conflict—in order to combat racism. rise of global Islamic fundamentalism over the last concerns about the recent history of Jews and of But Professor Trigano’s claim that SOS Racisme’s 15 years. Likewise, his assertion that the government Muslim-Jewish encounters in France. The taking most significant slogan was “Jews=Immigrants” is repeatedly refused to acknowledge the seriousness of hostage and murder of Jews in January 2015 at the simply untrue. In fact, SOS Racisme became most anti-Semitism in France overlooks considerable evi- Hypercacher supermarket in Paris was a horrific act widely known for its hand-shaped yellow badge that dence to the contrary. While such a critique was war- of anti-Semitism. Professor Trigano is correct that read “Touche pas à mon pote” (Hands off my friend). ranted in the early 2000s, since 2003, three successive this attack was hardly an isolated event: Since au- And while the term “pote” consciously sought to blur French heads of state have repeatedly condemned both tumn 2000, France has seen a major spike in anti- immigrant and native, outsider and insider, to com- individual anti-Semitic acts and the broader presence Semitism, in which physical attacks against Jews municate that all victims of racism were the same, of anti-Semitism in no uncertain terms. Moreover, in and Jewish institutions have played an increasingly the Beur activists who helped build this organiza- annually published government reports, the National lethal role. Moreover, recent opinion surveys indi- Consultative Commis- cate a significant percentage of the French public, sion on Human Rights Muslims especially, harbor negative stereotypes has painstakingly docu- about Jews. We also view with serious concern the mented the number of rise of pockets of radical Islam in France and agree anti-Semitic incidents in that moderate Islamic leaders should exert a more France and the degree to systematic effort to shape attitudes among French which they dwarf those Muslims on a number of important issues. Like- of racist crimes against wise, we concur that the far right has played a key any other group. role in setting the terms of contemporary French politics and has shown repeated ambivalence re- ven more prob- garding questions of anti-Semitism. Elematic is Professor While we thus agree with Professor Trigano on Trigano’s repeated insis- several points, his overall analysis profoundly distorts tence on the “automatic recent Muslim and Jewish history in France. Indeed, exculpation of Islam he makes a number of problematic historical leaps from any responsibil- and unsubstantiated claims. First, his focus on de- ity.” In fact, for at least velopments of the 1980s as the causal framework for half a century, various understanding anti-Jewish violence in recent years state and non-state ac- places undue emphasis on a particular moment of tors have presented Islam French history without accounting for subsequent Muslim women demonstrate against the French proposal to ban the hijab, or and Muslims as a central transformations. He also makes assertions about the headscarf, in state schools, Paris, January 2004. (Pascal Le Segretain/Getty problem facing French 1980s itself that are incomplete and misleading. Images.) society. The 1989 head- For Trigano, the origins of many of France’s re- scarf affair moved rap- cent problems can be found in the period following tion were generally not immigrants; rather, they were idly from a local dispute into a national cause the influx of North African and Sub-Saharan Afri- French-born Muslim citizens with as much a claim célèbre, the stakes of which were described repeat- can immigrants into France and the 1981 election to national inclusion as their Jewish allies. If activists edly in apocalyptic terms (several prominent intel- of François Mitterrand’s Socialist Party. In Trigano’s in SOS Racisme argued that anti-immigrant racism lectuals, for instance, warned ominously that this telling, as immigration became increasingly contro- and anti-Jewish racism were equally dangerous, the could mark the surrender of secular public educa- versial, Mitterrand and his party fought the growing essential basis for their partnership was their joint tion in France). Debates over the hijab only resolved influence of the far right under Jean-Marie Le Pen by citizenship, not foreignness. in 2004, after the president of France convened a na- establishing an “anti-fascist front” that incorporated Moreover, while SOS Racisme was arguably as tional commission on the issue of “ostentatious reli- the fight against anti-Semitism to prove the just- influential as Professor Trigano suggests in its early gious signs” in schools. Numerous scholars such as ness of its cause. Trigano focuses particularly on the years, by the end of the 1980s the organization had John Bowen and Joan Scott have convincingly shown founding of SOS Racisme, a Socialist-backed anti- been weakened dramatically due to three factors: the that such high-level attention had little to do with a racist body that he argues conflated Jews and immi- First Intifada that brought divisions over the Middle real crisis for schools or secularism and everything grants into a single construct to fight for a more just East conflict to the fore; the rising electoral strength to do with fear and demonization of Islam. In 2008, France. This move, he insists, positioned Jews outside of the National Front and the impact of its anti- then-President Nicolas Sarkozy successfully pushed

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 47 for the passage of a national law banning the niqab, be classified, like the French colonists in Algeria, as tural limitations that prevent full participation in a or so-called burqa, a more restrictive garment worn “Europeans.” A spring 1962 law provided for signifi- given society. In the French case, there are few, if by perhaps a few thousand Muslim women in all of cant material aid and basic support for all immigrants any, structural barriers facing France’s Jewish citi- France. Two years later, facing growing unpopular- in this category upon their arrival in France. zens. With full access to jobs, housing, education, ity, Sarkozy’s government convened a months-long and the range of life opportunities, French Jews en- national debate—scheduled to conclude on the eve of joy an arguably unprecedented level of acceptance. the regional elections—about the meaning of French The 1989 headscarf affair moved By contrast, as numerous sociological studies about identity, insisting that the burqa, deemed once more rapidly from a local dispute into employment, housing, police practices, and more a major national issue, be an item for discussion. Pro- have shown, it is Muslims in France who face the fessor Trigano’s piece fails to acknowledge this un- a national cause célèbre, the greatest structural barriers. To speak merely of mistakable historical pattern of Islam and Muslims rising anti-Semitism in a context in which other being anything but exculpated by the French state stakes of which were described French citizens are being systematically targeted for and society. discrimination is, then, to present a skewed picture Indeed, Professor Trigano is himself quick to repeatedly in apocalyptic terms. of the nature of bigotry in contemporary France. criticize Islam as a whole. When he claims that Clearly, French society has arrived at an ex- “there is a long history of Islamic anti-Judaism, and Muslims in Algeria, meanwhile, generally lost tremely challenging moment in its relationship to it is the reason for the attacks against the Jews,” the their French citizenship at the very same moment; its Jewish minority. And unlike Professor Trigano, author falls into a vision of Islam as characterized the vast majority of these French citizens were ex- we have the luxury of writing from the other side of from the Qur’an to the present by an unceasing, immutable hatred of Jews. As numerous scholars such as Mark Cohen have documented, the pre-modern history of anti-Judaism was far more severe and persistent in Christian Europe than in the Islamic world. No serious student of Islamic extremism today, no matter how critical, would claim that ji- hadists such as the Kouachi brothers, Amedy Cou- libaly, or Mohamed Merah (the assailant in the 2012 shooting at a Jewish school in Toulouse) have simply followed Islam’s traditional teachings regarding Jews. Rather, numerous analysts have shown how the leading ideologies of radical Sunni Islam like Salafism and Wahhabism—which emphasize lethal hatred of Jews, Christians, and the West—are distinctly modern. Such extremists draw selectively on texts like the Qur’an to justify what are in fact radical departures from mainstream tradition. Clearly, the attack at Hypercacher is no more a simple out- growth of what Professor Trigano calls “the traditional Muslim disparagement of non-Muslims” than was Baruch Goldstein’s Purim massacre of 1994 in a mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs the logical outcome of the ancient Jewish injunction to destroy Amalek and his descendants. Professor Trigano’s article also equates Muslims Demonstrators hold signs at a rally organized by SOS Racisme against the violence by French with foreigners. As noted above, his critique of the far-right party Front National (FN) militants, April 2007, Lyon, France. (Jean-Philippe Ksiazek/ Mitterrand government in the 1980s contrasts Mus- AFP/Getty Images.) lims as “newly arrived immigrants” with Jews, whom he insists should never have been identified as a “community of immigration.” Such a distinction be- plicitly not classified as “Europeans.” Moreover, the Atlantic, which means we do not experience the lies the complexity of the recent history of Muslims the so-called harkis, the Muslim soldiers who had daily tensions in France as he does. Yet we remain and Jews in France. France’s Jewish population more fought on the French side during the struggle for deeply concerned about the distorted view of French than doubled in the mid-to-late 20th century due to a Algerian independence, were indeed abandoned society to which his essay gives expression. Professor large migration wave from North Africa that includ- by the French state. At least 10,000 were massacred Trigano’s attacks on left-wing multiculturalism, on ed Professor Trigano himself. While the Algerian by the Algerian nationalists while the French mili- expressions of public difference, on allegedly wide- Jews who made up one half of this migration were tary—under secret orders from President Charles spread indulgence of Muslims, and on Islam itself technically “French,” so too were Algerian Muslims, de Gaulle—refused to help them escape to France. add up to a rejection of any possibility that France who had held French citizenship since 1946. Muslim soldiers who did eventually migrate to might come to embrace its multi-ethnic reality in an Indeed, the author’s invocations of the history of France were typically housed for decades on the inclusive manner. If such views become dominant, French Algeria and subsequent post-colonial migra- fringes of society, in the sub-standard living con- the future of Jews in France is indeed bleak. tions are decidedly problematic. While we do not ditions of French camps, foresting villages, or spe- doubt his painful memories of his family’s departure cially built urban housing. Although Professor Trig- from Algeria in 1962, when he claims “The State had ano’s insistence on recurrent Jewish abandonment Ethan B. Katz is an assistant professor of history at abandoned us; death loomed,” he distorts history. As by the French state suggests that Jews were uniquely the University of Cincinnati. His book The Burdens of Todd Shepard demonstrates in his recent book, The targeted, in fact the story is far more complex. Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and This brings us to another key difference in the France is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. the Remaking of France, if any group should have positions of Jews and Muslims in French history felt abandoned in 1962, it was Algeria’s Muslims. By and society. As we have acknowledged, anti-Jewish Maud S. Mandel is a professor of history and Judaic studies the time most Jews left Algeria, key Jewish and non- attitudes and violence are certainly on the rise in and serves as Dean of the College at Brown University. She Jewish actors had successfully ensured that they France. However, racism, as is well-known, must is the author of Muslims and Jews in France: History of a would be able to retain their French citizenship and be measured by an additional dimension: the struc- Conflict (Princeton University Press).

48 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 The View from Paris: A Rejoinder to Ethan Katz and Maud Mandel

BY Shmuel Trigano

nlike Professor Trigano,” Ethan condition juive sous l’islam 1148–1912, for instance, large Arab and Islamic institutions, rather than Katz and Maud Mandel write, or compare the 1066 massacre in Granada to the just a few courageous individuals, that loudly and “we have the luxury of writ- depredations of the First Crusade in 1096. With unequivocally condemned the violence, then such ing from the other side of the Atlantic.”“U Indeed. Professors Katz and Mandel not only write from the other Professors Katz and Mandel not only write from the other side of the Atlantic, they view the anti- side of the Atlantic, they view the anti-Semitic violence we Semitic violence we Jews are living through here in France through American-made binoculars. There Jews are living through here in France through American- is, perhaps, nothing wrong with citing the work of other American academics on recent French histo- made binoculars. ry as if it were definitive (“as John Bowen and Joan Scott have convincingly shown,” and so on), or writ- regard to more modern times, they might consult, lectures on why Muslim anti-Semitism in France ing as if something like the multicultural policies of among others, a book I edited covering the period was not historically inevitable might have more American university campuses (or even America) from 1940 until 1970, The Exclusion of the Jews from relevance. As it is, the apparent function of both could address the difficult and distinctively Europe- Arab Lands. And, of course, modern forms of radi- the politician’s automatic discourse and the present an social issues France and French Jewry face right cal Islam, such as Salafism and Wahhabism, are, yes, professorial chiding is to keep one from thinking now, but the stridency of their tone is surprising. precisely modern, but that does not mean that they about the nature of empirical Islam as it actually ex- My essay, which attempted to condense 30 years of are not Islamic movements or that their teachings ists in the mosques and on the streets—and what history, scholarship, and increasingly painful ex- do not have deep roots in the tradition. might be required of it to achieve real social inte- perience into an account of my “journey through If these modern forms of radical Islam were not gration in France. French anti-Semitism,” makes “historical leaps,” so widely and firmly entrenched and if there were Nor will it do, as Katz and Mandel almost suggest, “overlooks” this, and “ignores” that; my views are “distorted,” my claims are “unsubstantiated,” my factual claims are “simply untrue,” and my emphases are “undue.” I might have expected more from academic colleagues; after all I have edited two journals and written 11 books on the subject, most recently a collection of pieces titled Fifteen Years of Loneliness: New to French Jews 2000–2015. But the attempt to reduce Routledge my arguments, observation, and analysis to a mere in 2015 state of mind, and to do so in such heated prose, is, in the end, revealing. One thing that particularly exercises Katz and Mandel is my statement that it is problematic that Israel Journal after virtually every condemnation of a vicious attack by a Muslim or Muslims upon Jews there is a of Foreign Affairs warning not to slip into Islamophobia or conflate Is- lam with terrorism. As I wrote, this is a public ritual A publication of the Israel Council on that involves “exculpation of Islam from any respon- Foreign Relations under the auspices sibility” for the violence. It’s pretty clear that they of the World Jewish Congress think that I myself have slipped into Islamophobia here. I am “quick,” they say, “to criticize Islam as a Visit the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs whole,” and have fallen “into a vision of Islam as website at www.tandfonline.com/rifa to: characterized from the Qur’an to the present by an unceasing, immutable hatred of Jews.” But of course n Register for table of contents email alerts hatred doesn’t have to be unceasing and immutable n Find out how to submit an article to be both a genuine historical phenomenon and n Access the latest journal news and offers dangerous. It is not me, but Katz and Mandel who n Find pricing and ordering information. are indulging in wishful historical thinking here. Further, whether Mark Cohen was categorically right that “the pre-modern history of anti-Judaism was far more severe and persistent in Christian Eu- rope than in the Islamic world” may be less clear www.tandfonline.com/rifa than they think. Certainly it was different. They might usefully consult David Littman and Paul Fen- ton’s massive collection of texts L’Exil au Maghreb, la

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 49 to make of the current crisis a conflict between so- seem to think. What I am saying is that both the n their conclusion Katz and Mandel acknowl- called Algerian Jews (including, they write, “Professor Jewish community and Muslims were politically Iedge that “anti-Jewish attitudes and violence are Trigano himself,” though the category has not existed instrumentalized by Mitterrand to terrible his- certainly on the rise in France.” And then they go for more than half a century and we have, in fact, been torical effect. on to another kind of ritual automatic discourse. “technically”—one notes their adjective—French Katz and Mandel’s description of SOS Racisme Since “racism, as is well-known, must be measured since 1870) and the Muslim community. In fact, I itself is extraordinarily, almost comically, uncriti- by . . . structural limitations that prevent full par- went into some detail on the origins of the current cal: “Working together to create a just and peaceful ticipation in a given society,” and since Muslims situation in French politics of the 1980s. France, these activists put aside their differences . . .” face such limitations and Jews do not, one ought Their only real critique of my account of the political not speak “merely of rising anti-Semitism”— atz and Mandel are, if anything, even more use and eventual effect of this movement in French merely!—when “other French citizens are being Kincensed by my political genealogy of the present situation in which French Jews find them- As I write this reply, two more news reports appear on my selves. The core of my analysis was that Presi- dent Mitterrand backed SOS Racisme in order to computer screen of violent attacks against Jews who were co-opt the “Marche des Beurs” (which threatened the Socialist Party’s power) and create the specter targeted—that is the correct word—on the streets of Paris. of a fascist threat in the form of Le Pen by forming an “anti-fascist” front. Given the still-fresh politics is to argue over whether “Jews=Immigrants” systematically targeted for discrimination.” Their memory of the Shoah, it was politically and sym- was its most important slogan. Suffice it to say that it language here is unintentionally revealing: Anti- bolically important that SOS Racisme grew out of was significant, for the equation it asserted underlay Judaism is described passively as being “on the the French Jewish Students’ Union. In imputing the pervading silence that would, for a long time, rise,” while Muslims are described as being “sys- a large historical responsibility to Mitterrand and greet anti-Jewish violence. It was a conflict between tematically targeted.” But of course it is we Jews his administration, I am precisely not blaming im- two groups somehow alien to French society rather who feel with good reason that there is a target on migrants and Muslims, as Katz and Mandel would than within it. our backs. With their little sociological syllogism whose major premise is an unexamined dogma, we are debarred from discussing jihadis killing Jews, Celebrating our or beatings on the street, or the fear we feel on walking into a synagogue or out of a kosher mar- ket, because it would “present a skewed picture of JEWISH REVIEW the nature of bigotry in contemporary France.” 5th anniversary! OF BOOKS As Katz and Mandel say, these are challenging times for France. Fortunately, at least some prominent politicians and policymakers here seem to have stepped back from the kind of wishful ideological thinking to which my American interlocutors are For 5 years . . . we’ve had it covered. still beholden, but I fear that it is too late. For this is From Daniel Gordis on the future of the Conservative movement not merely a matter of the proper social and historical description of the situation—though that is where To Ruth R. Wisse on the making of Jewish humor one must begin—but a real national and even Europe- And Shlomo Avineri on talking Kant with Henry Kissinger wide political problem. In France, the separation between state and religion was preceded by the formal We look forward to the next 5 years as the magazine renunciation of collective status by both Jews and for serious readers with Jewish interests. Christians (more precisely Catholic clergy) in order to join the post-revolutionary nation. This was forc- Subscribe today and get: ibly imposed by the state, and one may think whatever Print + Web + App + Archive + e-Book one wants of the process, but it worked. I have considerably less hope than Professors Katz and Mandel for www.jewishreviewofbooks.com the efficacy of “left-wing multiculturalism.” or call 877-753-0337 As I write this reply, two more news reports appear on my computer screen of violent attacks Subscribe now for against Jews who were targeted—that is the cor-

only $29.95/year rect word—on the streets of Paris. In one of them, a (4 issues) woman was attacked and beaten by three men who shouted “Hitler did not finish his work.” Such words and actions are no longer uncommon here. They may not be “structural limitations,” but they have restructured our lives. Katz and Mandel write that they “do not wish to trivialize Professor Trigano’s personal experiences,” but they trivialize and mis- construe much more than that.

Shmuel Trigano is a professor of the sociology of politics and religion at Paris University and founder of the Popular University for Judaism. He is the author of 23 books including, in English, The Democratic Ideal and the Shoah: The Unthought in Political Modernity (SUNY Press) and Philosophy of the Law: The Political in the Torah (Shalem Jewish Culture. Cover to Cover. Press). He has just published, in French, Fifteen Years of Loneliness: French Jews 2000–2015 (Berg International).

50 Jewish Review of Books • Summer 2015 Last Word How the Baby Got Its Philtrum

BY Abraham Socher

ometime after World War II, Humphrey Bog- discussion of the embryo and soul before birth and he is confronted with something . . . familiar, be- art, or rather Frank McCloud, goes out to the developments of the story in later rabbinic litera- cause he has already studied it and the knowledge Florida Keys to visit the father (Lionel Barry- ture, but that’s not quite right. was stored up in the recesses of his memory.” As more) and young widow (Lauren Bacall) of Rabbi Simlai, a talmudic preacher who is most Soloveitchik and others, including the 19th-century Sa soldier who had been under his command in the famous for saying that there are precisely 613 com- scholar Adolph Jellinek, who published an elabo- Battle of San Pietro. The soldier’s father asks McCloud mandments in the Torah, taught that the embryo rate medieval version of the tale, recognized this to tell him something about how his son died. sits in its mother’s womb like “folded writing tab- seems to be a version of Plato’s famous theory of lets, its hands rest on its two temples, its two elbows knowledge as recollection. However, it’s worth not- McCloud: Three days and three nights he on its two legs, and its heels against its behind.” ing that although these texts speak of the unborn stayed awake directing our fire. Most of that child as forgetting they don’t explicitly describe its time I was on the other end of the line. To There is no time in which a man enjoys greater later learning as remembering. keep himself awake, he talked into the phone. happiness than in those days, as it is said, “O The Maharal of Prague came close when he Talked and talked . . . Most of his talk was that I were as in months gone by, in the days suggested that the angel slaps the unborn child’s about you two. You’d be surprised how much I when God watched over me, when his lamp mouth to create “a lack and a desire,” by which he know about you both. For instance, inside your shone over my head, when I walked in the seems to have meant both a desire to nurse and a wedding ring there’s an inscription: “Evermore.” dark by its light” (Job 29:2–3) . . . [these are] the desire to learn. But the Maharal lived in 16th-century Nora Temple: That’s right. months of pregnancy. It is also taught the entire Prague when Plato was, once again, on every intel- Frank McCloud: And you, Mr. Temple. lectual’s lips. Some 200 years later, Rabbi Elimelekh Remember telling George what this hollow is of Lizhensk explicitly argued that if we hadn’t learn above the upper lip? Before he was born, you Torah before we entered the world it would be im- said, he knew all the secrets of life and death. possible to grasp it now—a Hasidic footnote to Plato. And then at his birth, an angel came and put his finger right here [touching his ertainly, the idea of learning as a recovery of upper lip] and sealed his lips. Cwhat we once possessed is what makes Bogart’s James Temple: I remember that! Yep. bubbe mayse, and ours, so memorable: We can all He couldn’t have been more than touch that little hollow and feel the impress of for- seven years old when I told him that gotten knowledge. But—to repeat the question you fairy story. may have forgotten amidst the flurry of sources— when did the angel’s slap become a gentle, indent- I’ve wondered on and off over the years ing touch? just how this Jewish legend ended up on It may have been suggested by a reading of Bogart’s lips. Key Largo (1948) is based on the Zohar’s parallel discussion in which the angel Maxwell Anderson’s play of the same name, marks, or presses, the fetus on the mouth before it is but Anderson was the son of a Baptist minister. As Selah Before the Angel’s Touch. (Illustration by born (the verb is roshem, and I am indebted to Joel far as I know, there is no Christian version of this Mark Anderson.) Hecker for conversation on the point), but goes no just-so “fairy story” of how the baby got its phil- futher. This could have provided faint inspiration trum—which is the name of that little, centered hol- Torah . . . and it says “God’s company graced for our story. low we all have above our lips. It also doesn’t sound my tent.” (Job 29:4) As soon as it sees the light, When did the actual legend of the baby’s hollow like Anderson. I was reminded of this and related an angel comes and slaps it on the mouth and it appear? Who created the just-so story that screen- mysteries recently while gazing at my most recent forgets the entire Torah. (Niddah, 30b) writer Richard Brooks put into Bogart’s mouth? The granddaughter, a gray-eyed infant who gazed back answer is that I still don’t know, or, at any rate, can’t with a somber, seemingly knowing look. An early medieval text, Midrash Tanhuma, adds remember. (If you do, I’ll renew your subscription As it turns out, there isn’t much of a mystery as to several colorful details, including that the angel’s for free.) Brooks, one imagines, heard the story him- how Anderson got ahold of the story: He didn’t. John name is Laila (Night), but it is still a slap on the self when he was also not “more than seven years Huston, the film’s director, hated Anderson’s play— mouth, not a mythic caress. old,” which would be around 1920, a few years be- “That son of a bitch, he can’t write!”—and worked If Rabbi Simlai’s myth explains any physiological fore Rabbi Kanievsky would have heard it in Pinsk with a young screenwriter named Richard Brooks to mystery, it is, as a leading Israeli Yemenite rabbinic and a few decades before Rabbi Ratzabi would have rewrite it from scratch. And Brooks was born Ruben authority Rabbi Yitzhaq Ratzabi has pointed out, done so in Kfar Saba. Sax, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, so I’d be willing how the baby chooses a particular moment to en- If Brooks retold the story to his own child, it to bet that he is the source of this little bit of mytho- ter the world and why it cries when it does. Ratzabi would probably have been in the ecumenical ver- logical stage business. But there is, it turns out, a mys- knows the legend of the philtrum, but dismisses it as sion of Key Largo, with the unborn child learning tery as to the origin of the myth itself. having no talmudic basis. Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, “secrets of the world” rather than the Torah. Ac- the current reigning Ashkenazi authority among cording to his biographer, when his wife, the actress ver the last few weeks, I’ve asked a couple of Israeli haredim, has been quoted to similar effect. Jean Simmons, asked him if they should bring up Odozen Jews, men and women, scholars and But they both know the legend and neither of them their daughter as a Jew, he replied, “Oh, give the kid laypeople, raised in homes ranging from secular to saw it on Netflix. a break.” But that, of course, is merely part of the Orthodox, whether they heard this story growing The philosophical point that seems to hover larger story of the forgetfulness of American Jews. up. Most of them had. The literary scholar How- over this talmudic passage and its later elabo- ard Schwartz recently retold it in a children’s book rations is that learning is really an act of recall. called Before You Were Born. Schwartz, like seem- As Rav Soloveitchik once wrote, “Rabbi Simlai Abraham Socher teaches at Oberlin College and is the ingly everyone else, traces it to a famous talmudic wanted to tell us that when a Jew studies Torah, editor of the Jewish Review of Books.

Summer 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 51 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS A Publication of Bee.Ideas, LLC. 745 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1400 New York, NY 10151