States of Exile

I was watching "Insights Into Sikhism" on television, and started wondering about the background of the host, the Caucasian Hari Nam Singh Khalsa. Turns out this white Sikh with the long flowing beard is Jewish : Before he joined the faith, he was a nice Jewish kid from Toronto who loved music and hated to have his hair cut. When the sixties happened, he was happy to go long-haired. He says his interest in Sikhism began with learning about the teachings and strengthened when he heard the music played in the temples. “It just blew my mind.” And he was intrigued by the notion of a faith that believes in letting hair grow long. But it was far more than the beautiful tunes and wonderful lion-like manes of hair he saw when older Sikh men took off their turbans. For a restless young man who’d been on a spiritual quest since he was a small child, there was something about the faith that spoke to him on a deeply personal level. “This is the religion I want” he thought. It took years ...

The yellow peril! It is not racial, it is spiritual. It does not involve inferior values; it involves a radical strangeness, a stranger to the weight of its past, from where there does not filter any familiar voice or inflection, a lunar or Martian past. - Emmanuel Levinas Levinas may have been overly pessimistic. An article in the Forward affirms Chinese Judeophilia : According to Song Lihong, deputy director of the Glazer Institute of Jewish Studies at Nanjing University, a glance at the shelves of Jewish-interest books in Chinese bookstores provides a clue as to why Judaism fascinates. Popular titles include “The Talmudic Wisdom in Conducting Business,” “Talmud: The Greatest Jewish Bible for Making Money” and “Unveiling the Secrets of Jewish Success in World Economy: What’s Behind Jewish Excellence?” While Song acknowledges that the nature of this interest may seem “ominous” to Westerners, he insists that there is nothing sinister about it. Divorced from the Christian context that b...

I resent the matrilineal definition of Judaism. Wherever I shoot my sperm, there a Jew should be. Jewish males circumcise our penises in the name of the faith - the least the faith can do is declare our penises arbiters of holiness. What do Jewish women inflict on their vaginas to make them sacred? Also, the matrilineal definition of Judaism interferes with the emergence of the Semitic-Mongoloid super-race, as embodied by the children of tiger mother Amy Chua. By combining their forces, Chinese mothers and Jewish fathers have the potential to save Western civilization. An article in the Forward deals briefly with the interracial trend, as exemplified in the movie The Social Network : In a scene in the film, in which the Mark Zuckerberg character pulls his friend Eduardo Saverin out of an AEΠ (a Jewish fraternity) party to talk to him, Zuckerberg glances over at a group of Asian female Harvard students and asks what they are doing there. Saverin answers with something about how Asian gi...

From the Forward : In 1965 Cioran wrote “I am metaphysically Jewish,” which he followed in 1969 with: “The only people I relate to deeply are Jews. We share the same imperfections.” His further metaphysical reflection in 1970, “The refusal of Christianity by the Jews can only be termed brilliant,” is topped by the following mordant ethical critique of European character: “The only good folks in Germany were Jews. Now that they are dead, all that remains is a kind of monstrous Belgium.” "Metaphysical Judaism" is a nebulous category of being, overlapping with but not synonymous with "physical Judaism." If we ascribe to the Kabbalistic notion of gilgul , we could say Cioran was a Jew in a previous life. We could also say all "metaphysical Jews" were Jews in a previous life, and "physical Jews" should proselytize them.

“Interiorization is not a dividing line between ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’: it signifies a crisis within Jewish eschatology itself--in Pauline Christianity as well as in the Sabbatian movement of the seventeenth century. How else,” Taubes asks, “can redemption be defined after the Messiah has failed to redeem the external world except by turning inward?” Jacob Taubes, a man beyond petty distinctions between left and right, theism and atheism, is an enigma after my own heart : I discussed Taubes’s attraction to one of the leaders of the radical right wing in Israel, Geula Cohen. As Taubes’s own letters to Hugo Bergman demonstrate, it is impossible to separate his libidinal interest in her from his theopolitical curiosity regarding the Zionist 'political messianism.' I too have a hard time separating libidinal interest from theopolitical curiosity. The eschaton is a delayed orgasm, and the creative tension till that point is reached (internally or externally) is what drives th...

If Jesus were alive today, the Arabs would want to drive him into the sea.

Franck Salameh writes : Arab nationalism was never the strong suit of Egyptians; at least not the Egyptians outside the gilded gates of the military and the autocrats. For the average Egyptian, Arabism remained extraneous and superficial at best, pragmatically, not ideologically driven. Until his dying day, Taha Husayn (1889-1973), considered by many the doyen of modern Arabic literature—and for some time the Arab nationalists’ and Sati’ al-Husri’s bête noire of choice—scorned the faintest notion of an “Arab Egyptian” identity. He held Egypt’s roots to be Pharaonic, not Arab; maintained Egyptian culture and mentality to be closer to the ways of modern Greeks, Italians and Frenchmen than to those of Arabs; and considered his own use of the Arabic language to be immaterial and irrelevant to his Egyptian authenticity. . . . There were others still, besides Husayn and al-Sayyid, in Lebanon, in Syria, and Iraq; Middle Eastern intellectuals who celebrated diversity, and poured sharp criticis...