States of Exile

The Nation has an interesting article on Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, touching as well on the work of Hannah Arendt. A few passages struck me: At the lecture he delivered a few months before he died, a question was put to Hilberg: "Why do you not feel part of your community?" Without missing a beat, he responded, in an even voice, "I don't feel part of anything. I don't feel part of the university I've been a part of for decades. I don't feel part of Burlington, where I've spent all my years since 1956. I think some of us are just destined to be alone." I am reminded of the hymn by minister of industrial theology, Al Jourgenson: "Sky high with a heartache of stone / You'll never see me cos I'm always alone." The irony is that those who are truest to the essence of "religion" (religion meaning to bind together) are usually the most alone. Like Arendt, his relationship with Judaism was very much on his terms. The l...

Hungarian election news: The far-right Jobbik party captured seats in parliament for the first time, winning more than a million votes. . . . Jobbik, known for its anti-Semitic and anti-Roma (Gypsy) rhetoric, has risen from nowhere in the last few years, gaining almost 15% of Hungarian votes in European elections last year. I can only wonder how well Jobbik would have done if more than 0.6% of the population was Jewish. Polish historian Bronislaw Geremek wrote that "Poland is a country where there is anti-Semitism and no Jews, which is pathology in its purest state." Hungary now stakes its claim to greater purity.

A common complaint among the far-right (and increasingly far-left) commentariat of the Internet is that Jews attach a magical aura about themselves while criticizing others. Ironically, such complainants usually cite Jewish sources to support their claim: Israel Shahak, Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky. However, these names are Jewish in only a nominal sense, coming from the same tradition of psychic disequilibrium that produced Karl Marx and the only Jew Hitler ever liked, Otto Weininger. More interesting are the authentically Jewish yet self-critical voices of a magazine like Zeek. In a recent article, Shaul Magid writes of three dogmas of contemporary Judaism: (1) pro-Israelism (as distinct from Zionism); (2) the uniqueness of the Holocaust (as distinct from Holocaust memorialization); and (3) the war against intermarriage. . . . The first is a political allegiance to a country we don’t live in; the second is an argument (uniqueness) about an event that affects all of us but tha...

If you are a people struggling for survival, there are two models to follow: the proto-Zionist model of linguistic revival and kibbutzes, and the Nazi model of beer halls and putsches. The fate of the Boers is demonstrative of the pitfalls of the latter model. I look at the flag of assassinated supremacist Eugene Terreblanche 's movement and I see a variation on the swastika. The Boers have a case for national independence or autonomy, but they sabotage themselves by looking to the Nazi twelve-year reich instead of the Jewish millennia-long exilarchy for inspiration. So do some Israelis, unfortunately. The Guardian has an interesting article on ties between Israel and white-ruled South Africa. One man draws the inevitable comparison: "The whites [in South Africa] always saw their fate in a way related to the fate of the Israelis because the Israelis were a white minority surrounded by 200 million fanatic Muslims assisted by communism," says Liel. "Also, there was th...

[Anarchists] carried a very Jewish sense of righteousness, the spirit of the Book of Exodus; they rejected the idea of a life organized in pyramids of power and status, with a few Pharoahs on the top and masses of slaves underneath. - Jesse Cohn, Anarchy in Yiddish The pyramids remain, but Egypt is enslaved to Araby. The pharaonic model of divine kingship was doomed to failure because it was based on earthly might. When a stronger model of earthly might appeared, the pharaoh's flatterers became the prophet's flatterers. The Israelites however, pledged fealty to an otherworldly sovereign that no worldly power could possibly displace. And so the temple is destroyed but Israel is free. Every circumcised penis is a message from our immortal Ozymandias to the spiritual slaves of mortal glory: look my works, ye mighty, and despair!