States of Exile

From a New Yorker article : In the late nineteen-twenties, with Paul Eldridge, a Jewish friend, Sylvester Viereck wrote a trilogy of best-selling novels chronicling the adventures of an apparently immortal “Wandering Jew.” (Sylvester himself was Lutheran.) The books combined politics, history, and philo-Semitic race theory with a good deal of sex.

Kevin MacDonald writes: Jewish commitment to liberalism in the West has been all about ethnic hardball, not about high-flown moral values. Jewish liberalism is the cutting edge aimed at displacing previously dominant WASP elites and their culture. It is not motivated by a moral universalism of human rights — a philosophy that is utterly foreign to the Jewish tradition. Rather, it is motivated by fear and loathing of the traditional peoples and cultures of Europe — and the desire to become a dominant elite. Peter Beinart writes : When he probed the students’ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, “they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.” These young Jews, Luntz explained, “resist anything they see as ‘group think.’” They want an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its flaws. . . . Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in...

The Passion Play : "Cru-ci-fy him!" It is the scene that makes the rabbis so uncomfortable. It's a powerful scene. It doesn't, however, convey a distorted image of the Jewish people. It portrays humans as individuals who are part of a crowd, a crowd that becomes frightening when it turns into an uncontrollable, manipulated mob. Mobs crucify. That's what they do. The portrayal of a Jewish mob is not a distorted image, because Jews can be just as irrational as any other collective. My problem is when a story with a universal message is stripped of universal significance. "The Jews killed their saviour!" People do that. The Germans killed Walter Rathenau, their only hope after Versailles. The Russians killed Alexander II, the emancipator of the serfs. The Hindus killed Gandhi! When we exile ourselves from the mob's dictates, we risk the cross. Upon further consideration the mob may declare us the messiah, and crucify the next exile who disagrees. Histo...

From a book review in the Forward : . . . the most vulgar document published by Assaf is quite clearly the tale recounting the “fall” of the famed founder of Polish Hasidism, Rabbi Yaakov Yitzhak Horowitz (1745-1815), popularly known as the khoyze, or seer, of Lublin. What is known is that sometime during the celebration of Simchat Torah in 1814, the severely inebriated seer fell, or more likely jumped, out the second-story window of his room above the Hasidic shtibl where he held court. Like the affair of Rabbi Moshe’s conversion to Christianity, Hasidic hagiography has managed to transform what was either a drunken mishap or a deliberate suicide attempt into a mystical affair signifying a failed attempt to hasten the messiah’s arrival. State of Exile's view: drunken mishaps do in fact hasten the messiah's arrival.

Sun turning 'round with graceful motion We're setting off with soft explosion Bound for a star with fiery oceans It's so very lonely, you're a hundred light years from home Freezing red deserts turn to dark Energy here in every part It's so very lonely, you're six hundred light years from home It's so very lonely, you're a thousand light years from home It's so very lonely, you're a thousand light years from home Bell flight fourteen you now can land Seen you on Aldebaran, safe on the green desert sand It's so very lonely, you're two thousand light years from home It's so very lonely, you're two thousand light years from home - Mick Jagger