States of Exile

There is a subtle link between anti-Semitism and anti-Socratism. This thought struck me while reading the following passage from Allan Bloom's interpretive essay on Plato's Republic : Our friends are those around us, and the insistence that they must be good is a seconday consideration, one that has an abstract ring to it. This condition is admitted in speech but has little effect in deed. And this means that men who loyally serve their friends are constantly and thoughtlessly doing injustice. This consequence cannot be avoided simply by making more effort, for Polemarchus' view is not merely a result of his laziness but a product of his attachment to family and city. He makes the primitive identification of the good with his own. . . . Once the distinction between what is good and one's own is made, the principle of loyalty to family and city is undermined. In order to be just, one must seek good men wherever they may be, even in nations fighting one's own nation. ...

Stalin called Jews rootless cosmopolitans. I prefer the ideal of the rooted cosmopolitan : A rooted cosmopolitanism will not promise the relative peace of violence suppressed and controlled--a promise that liberal modernity has utterly failed to fulfill--for it knows that the human heart lusts more for dominion than truth, more for power than for righteousness. But against the cool, disengaged, and manipulative ethos of atomistic universalism, it can promise to meet others in the full bloom of their loves and in the full force of their loyalties. It lets men draw their swords. I have always thought that taking a man's sword seriously and meeting his convictions with a forceful vigor of one's own is the essence of cosmopolitanism: respect. Rooted cosmopolitanism has a distinguished pedigree: Herder and Hegel, for example, saw that the concreteness of our historical identities was precisely the medium in which we found and expressed our universal humanity. Later figures such as v...

Go home to your Jews and tell them that I am not a Jew and I care nothing for Jews and their fate. - Leon Trotsky, to Jewish delegation, 1921 There has never been so blunt a "non-Jewish Jew" than Trotsky. Yet inevitably, after communist, the first thing that comes to mind when people think of Trotsky is "Jew." If Trotsky didn't want to be considered a Jew, shouldn't we honour his wish? I raised the issue in a conversation with one of the more erudite anti-Semites trolling the Internet: Somehow every Jewish communist is representative of Judaism’s essence, every Jewish liberal is representative of a Jewish plot, but their Gentile equivalents get to be individuals with their own personal motivations. His reply: Either you are very poorly informed or being intellectually dishonest. Clearly, even those rabid anti-culture nihilists of the “Frankfurt School” were consciously attempting to advancing Jewish group interests. As was Jacob Schiff, capitalist and suppor...

Anti-Jewish Jew Gilad Atzmon asks a key question amidst his vitriol: Historically Jews have shunned many Gods, they dropped Jehovah, they dumped Marx, some have never followed Zionism. But in the light of the Holocaust religion, while bearing in mind the scenes from Gaza, Jenin and Lebanon, the Jew may have to continue in the tradition and drop “the Jew”. He will have to accept that his newly formed father-figure was formed in his own shape. More concerning is the devastating fact that the new father is proved to be a call to kill. Seemingly, the new father is the ultimate evil God of them all. I wonder how many Jews will be courageous enough to shun their esoteric newly formed father-figure. Will they be courageous enough to join the rest of humanity adopting a universal ethical discourse? Whether the Jew drops “The Jew”, only time will tell. Just to remove any doubt, I did drop my “Jew” a long time ago and I am doing fine. This is an argument Jews unwilling to "drop the Jew...

In an article from the New Republic on Slavoj Zizek, Adam Kirsch hurls a j'accuse! at Slovenia's "deadly jester" for his views on Judaism: Invoking Freud's Moses and Monotheism , Zizek asserts that Judaism harbors a "'stubborn attachment' ... to the unacknowledged violent founding gesture that haunts the public legal order as its spectral supplement." Thanks to this Jewish stubbornness, he continues, "the Jews did not give up the ghost; they survived all their ordeals precisely because they refused to give up the ghost." This vision of Judaism as an undead religion, surviving zombie-like long past the date of its "natural" death, is taken over from Hegel, who writes in the Phenomenology of Mind about the "fatal unholy void" of this "most reprobate and abandoned" religion. This philosophical anti-Judaism, which appears in many modern thinkers, including Kant, is a descendant of the Christian anti-Judaism ...

When you truly feel equal love for all beings, when your heart has expanded so much that it embraces the whole of creation, you will certainly not feel like giving up this or that. You will simply drop off from secular life as a ripe fruit drops from the branch of a tree. You will feel that the whole world is your home. - Ramana Maharshi Jesus was the Jewish Maharshi ("great seer"). He transcended the particular to feel equal love for all beings, dropping off from secular life as a ripe fruit drops from the branch of a tree. Individual Jews can achieve redemption from galut as surely as individual Hindus can achieve liberation from samsara . Jesus was part of the prophetic tradition, perhaps its culmination - but he was not the messiah. The messiah is not just an enlightened being who feels the whole world is his home; the messiah, in the Jewish tradition, makes the whole world home for everyone. Converting the whole world to Christianity cannot make the world Christ-like,...

Octavio Paz articulates many of my own sentiments - especially as they relate to the universal and the particular, the we and the other. To wit, the interview published under the title Iniquitous Symmetries in which his reflections on Latin America have import that go beyond it: Latin America belongs to the West both by virtue of its languages - Spanish and Portuguese - and by virtue of its civilization. Our political and economic institutions are also Western. But within this "Westernness" the Other, the Others lie hidden: Indians, pre-Columbian cultures or those brought from Africa by blacks, the peculiarity of our Hispano-Arabic heritage, the particularity of our history. All this makes of us a different, unique, eccentric world: we are and are not the West. Jews are similar to Latin Americans in this regard, except our particularity is our Semitic origins and history of exile. That makes us different, unique and eccentric compared with other Western peoples, but we are n...

In the essay Seeing and Using: Art and Craftmanship , Octavio Paz writes: Technology is international; its constructions, methods and products are the same everywhere. By suppressing national and regional particularities and peculiarities, it impoverishes the world. By spreading all over the globe, technology has become the most powerful agent yet of historical entropy. Clearly by technology Paz means more than just the physical products of mass production. He is referring to an idea: the idea that greater efficiency, greater functionality and greater uniformity are signs of universal progress. Faith in technological progress is not exclusive to any one ideology. Marxists and neoconservatives share the belief that the "end of history" (what Paz calls historical entropy) is the final result of technological progress. The "international Jew" tends to be associated with the adverse effects of technology and is scapegoated as its embodiment. But the Jew who maintains hi...