The following was from the introduction I’m writing with Alex Gourevitch for a new translation of Marx’s On the Jewish Question. I say was because I just had to cut it. It doesn’t work. But I thought I’d share it here, as a public service. If you’re ever the victim of antisemitic insults and want to know what to do, check out how a master rhetorician—Heinrich Heine—dealt with that kind of abuse, though please don’t use the homophobia he does in response! Heine forges one last weapon for his comic arsenal, which later writers like Kraus and Jewish American comedians will borrow and refine. At the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, the Jewish comedian Lewis Black describes the weapon thus: […]
It seems like we’ve been going through an epidemic of plagiarism scandals for the last couple of decades. (This is a topic I’ve written about a lot.) You see it in the political elite. Where once upon a time Joe Biden’s plagiarism of Neil Kinnock destroyed his presidential campaign (in 1988), politicians, even Supreme Court justices (paging Neal Gorsuch), routinely get exposed for plagiarism, and it doesn’t affect them at all. Same goes for journalists. For a time, I thought this surfeit of scandal was a sign of a declining ruling class or something. Some loss of a sense of liberal ownership, of the connection between property and self and all that. (Not for nothing, Adam Smith seems to have […]
Who was the first to come up with the “wages of whiteness” thesis, broadly construed as a theory of how racism works and functions in a hierarchical society? I’m not referring to Roediger’s book by that title, since the theory predates his book, as you can see below. I’m more interested in the general idea of it, which we can see across Europe and North America and across several centuries. For example, Ludwig Börne, a Jewish convert to Christianity, wrote this about German antisemitism in 1832: The poor Germans! Living on the bottom floor, oppressed by the seven floors of the upper classes above them, they resolve their feeling of anxiety by speaking about people who live even further below […]
I hesitate to give this issue any attention, lest it suck out more oxygen than it already has from Abdul El-Sayed’s inspiring campaign and yesterday’s victory in Michigan. But here goes. This morning, in his victory speech, El-Sayed stated: To all of my sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith, or any faith at all, or no faith at all, I want you to know that my commitment to your safety — to Jewish safety — is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters. Usually, campaign rhetoric doesn’t tell us much. But in the context of other conventional political statements about American Jews and Israel, what El-Sayed says here speaks volumes. Simply compare it […]
As everyone in the country who’s not a fanatical Trumpist breaths a sigh of relief over yesterday’s Supreme Court affirmation of birthright citizenship, it seems like a useful moment to reflect on Israel. The principle of birthright citizenship states that it matters not a whit who your parents are or where they’re from; you are a citizen of the United States merely by the fact that you were born on its soil. That’s it. Birthright citizenship is based on the principle of jus soli—Latin for “right of the soil.” The opposite of jus soli is jus sanguinis—”right of blood.” Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neal Gorsuch, who dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision, were arguing against jus soli, and much […]
I love this line that you see increasingly on social media and in politics: “Jews get to decide what antisemitism is.” I won’t go through all the obvious problems with the claim. I’m more fascinated by idea that somehow it’s part of our inheritance, our heritage, our privilege, our right, our pleasure and our joy, as Jews, to get to decide what antisemitism is. It’s not that, as Jews, we get to worship God as we see fit, or we get to celebrate our holidays as we see fit (and even, as is the case in New York, have the government acknowledge our holidays as public holidays), or that we get to cherish and teach our authors and texts. No, […]
In 1753, Britain considered a bill to allow the naturalization of the country’s 4,000 foreign-born Jews. Formally titled “An Act to permit Persons professing the Jewish Religion to be naturalized by Parliament,” the bill was widely known as the “Jew Bill.” Though it initially passed both houses of Parliament, it was repealed after a vicious campaign of antisemitism and nativism, led by the Tories. Today’s Republican Islamophobes in Congress are more brazen. They don’t wait for the public to do their dirty work of name-calling. They have actually titled a bill that would, among other things, strip Muslim citizens of their citizenship, the “MAMDANI Act.” When people say that the historic Jewish Question, which was about whether Jews could ever […]
The first appearance of the phrase “Jewish question” was in not in Germany, France, or anywhere on the Continent. It was in Britain, in 1754. In 1753, Parliament passed a bill allowing for the naturalization of Jews living in Britain. The bill, publicly called the “Jew-Bill,” provoked a massive controversy, leading to its repeal the following year. Joseph Grove wrote his “Reply to the Famous Jew Question” in response to the bill and the controversy. In 2026, nearly 275 years later, Stephen Miller, a Jewish American, is spearheading the most potent revival of today’s version of the original Jewish Question—that is, whether a religious, ethnic, or national minority can belong to a polity or not—in Britain’s most successful colony. And […]
From Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron: whensoever you employed those gifts for false and negative ends, and whensoever you had abandoned the desert’s renunciation and your gifts led you to the highest summit, then as a result of that misuse you were and ever shall be hurled back into the desert. Chag Sameach.
Marc Andreessen, one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, doesn’t do introspection. So he tells David Senra—whose great point of pride and life achievement, according to Senra’s website and statement to Andreessen, is that “I’ve read obviously four hundred, I think now, ten [that’s 410] biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs”—in a conversation that’s been making the rounds online. Many commentators seem intent on challenging Andreeseen’s claim that he doesn’t do introspection. It is, after all, a bit of a performative contradiction, since the mere affirmation, when asked if he has any levels of introspection, “Zero, as little as possible,” would seem to require at least some introspection and stock-taking. Otherwise, how would he know? But I’ll believe Andresseen. […]
Why does one question impinge upon the other? Why does one evoke the other when there is no obvious connection between them? . . . [A]ll the most important questions of Europe and humankind in our day are forever being raised simultaneously. And it’s this simultaneity that is so remarkable. The necessary condition for these questions to appear simultaneously is what constitutes the riddle! —Dostoevsky One of the most powerful insights of Marx’s On the Jewish Question, and the reason we return to it, is that he, almost alone among all the people who set out to answer the Jewish Question in the early 1840s, saw that the question itself was not really about the Jews at all but about […]
It’s interesting how many commentators on Marx’s relationship to Judaism focus on his father’s conversion to Christianity. Marx’s mother also converted to Christianity, and from what we know, hers was a more bitter and forced conversion than his father’s. Marx’s father converted entirely for professional reasons: he would no longer be able to practice as a lawyer if he hadn’t). But Marx’s father wasn’t that bothered by any residual attachment to Judaism or Jewishness, despite the fact that his father and then his brother were the chief rabbis of Trier. Marx’s mother, however, resisted conversion for as long as possible. She insisted on waiting till her father died (she, like her husband, came from a long line of rabbis), and […]
However crazy you think the Germans are about the Jews, they run at best a distant second to how German-speaking Jews think of the Jews. I’m reading two amazing books on this topic: one is S.S. Prawer’s book on Heine, the other is Paul Reitter’s book on Karl Kraus. These are old-style intellectual histories, the kind where a single author and their texts give you the largest possible window on the larger culture and society of which they are a part. No one writes intellectual history like this anymore, which is a shame. (Prawer, by the way, you might know as the author of that excellent book on Marx’s literary references and culture. His Heine book, if you can believe […]
The opposition of Jewish voters to Zohran Mamdani has been, and will continue to be, a flash point of commentary and conflict over the mayor. It reminds me a bit of how Black voters were often the flash point of commentary and conflict over Bernie Sanders in 2016. In the last year, Michael Lange has emerged as the sharpest analyst of NYC electoral politics. When it comes to the unlikely campaign and career of Mamdani, hardly anyone has equalled Lange’s record of analysis and prediction. In his latest post, Lange takes on the question of Jewish voters and Mamdani. Long story short: Cuomo performed best…among wealthier and older Jewish voters, while Mamdani performed best among younger Jewish voters and those […]
Yesterday, I was reading Jonathan Israel’s Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx, when I stumbled across a reference that sent me tumbling down an afternoon’s worth, or warren, of rabbit holes. In no particular order… 1. In February 1945, as Germany slowly dawned to its likely defeat in the Second World War, two of its representative intellectuals, Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt, launched the strangest, even by their standards, musing of the mind. Jünger kicked it off. Responding to a condolence card from Schmitt, Jünger stoically itemizes his losses over the last two years: his father, his son (killed during the war), and his hometown. With an unruffled melancholy, he registers the death and destruction that has occurred and is […]
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll once again be working with my friend and co-author Alex Gourevitch on a new writing project: an introduction to a new edition of Marx’s On the Jewish Question. The translation will be done by the excellent Paul Reitter, who did that new translation of Capital, and will be published by NYRB Classics, which has issued so many wonderful translations since its founding. It’s hard for me to think of a more timely text than On the Jewish Question. Despite his traffic in antisemitism, Marx is trying here to get us to think about religion, identity, and politics outside the framework of culture war, which had engulfed so many intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Instead of […]
Here are some findings from the last two days of the New York Times. Let’s put these pieces together. New Yorkers stand with Palestine. New Yorkers think that Mamdani has the best position of any of the mayoral candidates on Palestine. Jewish New Yorkers stand with Mamdani. Younger (and educated) New Yorkers overwhelmingly stand with Mamdani. Many of those younger New Yorkers are students, in the process of being educated. Some of those students attend CUNY. This past weekend, Mamdani went to Brooklyn College, where he said that students and staff and faculty at CUNY should not be punished for their activism on behalf of Palestine. Brooklyn College has fired four instructors for their activism on Palestine and is hauling […]
In shul yesterday, as we headed into the second half of Deuteronomy, we happened on some of those passages that contain one of the invocations of Amalek that Netanyahu made famous after October 7: “Remember what Amalek did to you.” “You shall blot out the memory of Amalek.” These and another passage were mentioned by Netanyahu and a great many other right-wing Zionists to justify and explain the slaughter of Palestinians that ensued in response to the attacks of October 7. But there are two fascinating wrinkles in the Parsha that complicate that simple story. First, the injunction to destroy Amalek comes after a whole series of other injunctions that are designed to turn the Israelites into a civilized, moral […]
News from the world that Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, are making for us.
-
Categories
Economies, Education, Jews, Labor/Workplace, Palestine and Israel, Repression, The Left, The Right
-
Tags Andrew Cuomo, Brooklyn College, Eric Adams, John Deere, Lisa Cook, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Northwestern, Zohran Mamdani
Until 2006, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch was chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, which is the leading academic and rabbinical training institute for Conservative Judaism. Which is all the more reason to be surprised, even shocked, by what he says in this interview with Peter Beinart. You have to understand the position of the JTS within American, even international Jewry, and the rabbinate it produces, to grapple with the full weight of Rabbi Schorsch’s statement. And know that he’s now 89 years old, and what it must be like, to have lived a full Jewish life to that age, to have survived and been a refugee from Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, to have created this world of rabbinic Judaism in the […]
-
Categories
Jews, Palestine and Israel
-
Tags Amos, Ezekiel, Foreigner, Gaza, Isaiah, Jewish Theological Seminary, Kristallnacht, Mishna, Peter Beinart, Prophets, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, Roberta Flack, Yom Kippur
I’m about to say something that may not land well with my usual readers who are opposed to the State of Israel. But I think it’s true. We often compare Israel to settler colonial states. Increasingly the comparisons have been made to fascist movements and states, even Nazi Germany. I’d like to suggest a different comparison, which may help make better sense not of Israel itself but of its supporters, particularly the ones I know best, here in the United States. I’d compare those supporters to the true believers on the left, who supported the Soviet Union between the 1930s and 1950s, often even afterward. I’m not the first to make this comparison; Tony Judt did before his death in […]
My wife and I saw “An Officer and a Spy” last night, which I highly recommend. Because it’s a Roman Polanski film, it’s not being distributed anywhere in the US. Nor is it available on streaming. But you can see it at Film Forum. It’s a superbly made film, about the Dreyfus Affair. Less about Dreyfus himself than about about Georges Picquart, the French officer who played a critical role in getting Dreyfus exonerated. That frame is problematic in all sorts of ways: as David Bell wrote in an excellent piece from a few years ago, when the film came out, the film dramatically underplays the mobilization of the French Jewish community as well as of the Dreyfusards. The entire […]
A cantor in Canada recently denounced what Israel is doing in Gaza as genocide. This is what ensued: Many colleagues, friends, and loved ones have gone from praising my recent award as a ‘Rabbinic Human Rights Hero’ for my efforts to mobilize the Jewish community against the death penalty, to vilifying me for what they claim is parroting anti-Semitic canards….I thought I knew of vitriol and recrimination; I was wrong. For years, proponents of the death penalty have lodged heinous verbal attacks against me for my public activism as the co-founder of ‘L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty.’ Even that could not have prepared me, however, for the deluge of hate and ridicule I have received throughout the Jewish world […]
If you oppose the state of Israel, this post is not for you. Let me repeat: This post is not for you. Many of my readers here, Jews and non-Jews, are already clear about the wrongness of what Israel is doing in Gaza. A subset of those readers are already clear that the State of Israel—as it was designed and constructed as an ethnocracy, an apartheid state, a Jewish supremacist state, what have you—is a historic injustice. This post is not for you. This post is for other people, Jews and non-Jews, who read my work, people who are less settled in their position on Israel and Palestine, people who identify as Zionist or with parts of the Zionist project, […]