Someone on Twitter tweeted this quote from Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual. Not a bad way to think about what we should be doing and how we should be doing it. Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you need the approval of a boss or an authority figure; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be […]
Here’s an excellent piece about how Amazon requires even its temporary employees to sign non-compete clauses that last a year and a half after their employment ends. The piece got me thinking a bit about employment contracts versus the covenant at Sinai (it’s Passover time). There are a lot of problems with contracts with employers, which Chris Bertram, Alex Gourevitch, and I explored in our “Let It Bleed” post at Crooked Timber three years ago. Among them are the imbalance of power between the two contracting parties and the fact that no employment contract can spell out all the terms of employment; there are just too many unknowns, both known and unknown, at the workplace. Interestingly, the covenant at Sinai, the […]
Last night, I read S. Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh. It’s a short novel about the Israelis’ roundup and expulsion of Arab villagers from a single village in 1948. Published in Israel in 1949, it’s a classic piece of modernist prose, veering within a single paragraph from the most biblical cadences and august references to the shit talk of soldiers. It’s also beautiful prose, observing the most incidental details—about animals, vegetation, dress, vomit—that never leave you once you read them. It also gave me a night of bad dreams. Maybe it’s because I’ve just come out of my six-month immersion in the Arendt/Eichmann archive, but it’s almost impossible—even if you’re the most fastidious of scholars or committed of Zionists—not to read Khirbet Khizeh without […]
1. “The trouble with intellectuals is that what starts as feelings ends in a hangover.” —Bertolt Brecht to Edwin Piscator 2. When Walter Benjamin asked Brecht, who was fleeing the Nazis, if he’d take refuge in Moscow, Brecht is supposed to have replied: “I am a Communist, not an idiot.” 3. In 1945, just after he had retired from UCLA with a meager pension, Arnold Schoenberg applied for a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. He was rejected. H/t this essay by George Steiner.
It’s long been remarked that the Holocaust and Israel have replaced God and halakha as the touchstones of Jewish experience and identity. The Holocaust is our deity, Israel our daily practice. You get a sense of this in a New York Times oped Elie Wiesel wrote on the day that NBC first aired its mini-series Holocaust. That was in April 1978. All Jewish families, mine included, watched it. One Jewish magazine even said that watching it “has about it the quality of a religious obligation” for Jews. Like the Six-Day War, it was a founding moment of contemporary Jewish identity. I remember it vividly. I watched all nine and a half hours of it. I developed a mad crush on one of […]
In 2002, I was slogging through a fellowship at NYU and feeling depressed. It was the aftermath of 9/11, and all the world was Paul Wolfowitz and Paul Berman. At our fellowship seminar, we were asked to read a book called May ’68 and Its Afterlives. I think we read it in proofs. I had never heard of it or its author, Kristin Ross. I fell in love with both after the second or third page. Kristin is one of those writers who seizes on an image and never lets you forget it. Now she’s got a book coming out on the Paris Commune; it’s called Communal Luxury. Here’s just a taste: In the decade following the massacre [of the Communards]…traces of […]
Three Muslim students killed in North Carolina. Jewish hostages killed at a kosher market in Paris. The Charlie Hebdo massacres. The NAACP firebombed in Colorado. And it’s just February. How will it end, how it will end? … this bleak year, year of blind rats, this bleak year of rage and rancor, you ask, you ask me, how will it end? —Pablo Neruda, Chronicle of 1948 (America)
Last night, I was trying to find a comment I had remembered Irving Howe making about Hannah Arendt, and I found myself holed up, late into the night, with a volume of his criticism. I run into these sorts of detours a lot. I set out for a destination, and before you know it, it’s 2 am, and I’m miles away from where I need to be. I’ve read Howe’s criticism many times before, but I never noticed just how touchy he is about what he perceives to be the haughtiness of authors and critics. Howe is sensitive, perhaps too sensitive, to the power dynamics of fiction and criticism: how writers look down on the people they’re writing about or the readers they’re writing for, how they […]
The Wall Street Journal reports on an Israeli novel about the liquidation of a Palestinian village during the Nakba, which was published 65 years ago and has been translated into English for the first time. My friends Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole had a major hand in commissioning and editing the translation. In 1949, the publication of a short novel “Khirbet Khizeh,” about the forceful evacuation of a Palestinian village by Israeli soldiers, created a stir in the newly established state of Israel. Now, 65 years later, the controversial Hebrew classic by S. Yizhar is taking on a new life in English. On Tuesday, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a new edition of the book’s first English translation, by Nicholas […]
Writing in The New Republic in November 1989, on the occasion of the magazine’s 75th anniversary, the literary critic Alfred Kazin, who had served as the magazine’s literary editor for a time, had this to say: What I read in the front of the book is informative, saucy, in tone terribly sure of itself. It gives me no general enlightenment on the moral and intellectual critic underlying the crisis of the week, above all no inspiration. There is no discernible social ideal behind all the clever counter-punching. Washington is more beautiful and imposing than it has ever been, is a wonderful town to look at—if you overlook Anacostia and Shaw. It always looks like Sunday; it can be a relief […]
My friend Peter von Ziegesar, who wrote a very affecting memoir about his brother that you should buy and read (I did!), speaks to PEN America: I don’t think that the notion of the public intellectual has fallen out of fashion. I think that he or she has moved their place of discourse to another location. Typically in the past the public intellectual, on the model of Susan Sontag, for example, or Norman Mailer, or Gore Vidal, lived in New York and published in esoteric journals, such as The New York Review of Books, or The Nation, and occasionally appeared on the Tonight Show. A friend of mine, Corey Robin, a professor at Brooklyn College who has written several books […]
Peter Cole, “On the Slaughter“: On the night of July 7, the gates opened, even as they were being closed, when the Israel Defense Forces launched what it calls for export Operation Protective Edge. (A more literal translation of the operation’s catchy Hebrew name would be Firm Cliff—with “cliff,” according to the Hebrew equivalent of the OED, evoking in its primary definition the high place in the wilderness off of which a scapegoat is cast each year on the Day of Atonement. Words, as we know, have powers often lost on those who speak them.)
Like most academics, I read articles and books. Unlike most academics (maybe, I don’t really know), reading has become harder and harder for me. Not simply because of the distractions that come with department politics, administrative duties (come July 1, I’m chair of my department), advising grad students, and teaching. I wish it were as noble as that. No, the reason I find it so difficult to read these days, now years, is the internet. Which is why I was so relieved to read this wonderful post by Tim Parks about how difficult it is now to read. Every reader will have his or her own sense of how reading conditions have changed, but here is my own experience. Arriving […]
Countering Thomas Piketty’s critique of inherited wealth, Tyler Cowen suggests that such dynastic accumulations of private wealth may be a precondition of great art: Piketty fears the stasis and sluggishness of the rentier, but what might appear to be static blocks of wealth have done a great deal to boost dynamic productivity. Piketty’s own book was published by the Belknap Press imprint of Harvard University Press, which received its initial funding in the form of a 1949 bequest from Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr., an architect and art historian who inherited a good deal of money from his father, a vice president of Bankers Trust. (The imprint’s funds were later supplemented by a grant from Belknap’s mother.) And consider Piketty’s native […]
I’ve been reading a work of American history for the last few weeks, and it’s making me crazy. I really think history took a wrong turn when its practitioners decided to opt for narrative over analysis. Not because that’s a methodologically unsound choice—it’s not—but because most of the people who’ve made it are just not up to the job. You’ve got these self-styled writerly historians, writing stories that are larded with “the telling detail” that doesn’t tell you anything at all. It’s just page after page of chazerai. Guys, if you’re going to be a Writer, take this lesson from a guy who knew a thing or two about writing: Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If […]
Greg Grandin writes in The Nation: Born in 1927, Gabriel García Márquez was 87 when he died last week. According to his younger brother, Jaime, he had been suffering from complications caused by chemotherapy, which saved his life but accelerated his dementia, a disease that apparently ran in his family. He’d call his brother and ask to be reminded about simple things. “He has problems with his memory,” Jaime reported a few years back. Remembering and forgetting are García Márquez’s great themes, so it would be easy to read meaning into his senility. The writer was fading into his own solitude, suffering the same fate he assigned to the inhabitants of his fictional town of Macondo, in his most famous […]
From the Haggadah: And they did us evil, those Egyptians. They made us seem malevolent, as it is written: Behold, the nation of the children of Israel has become too many and too massive for us. Let us find a solution for this before they further multiply. Two points. First, the evil that the Egyptians did to the Jews was to construe them as malevolent, as wicked. Second, their wickedness consisted in becoming a massive nation within a nation. The Egyptians understood the wickedness of the Jews, in other words, by virtue of the demographic challenge they posed to the Egyptian nation. I’m not big on readings of the Haggadah that seek to extract contemporary political instruction from the text. […]
The first night of Passover is on Monday, and I’ve been thinking about and preparing for the Seder. I had a mini-victory this morning, when I was shopping for fish in Crown Heights. The guy at the fish store told me that thanks to the Polar Vortex, 90% of Lake Huron is frozen. Which means no whitefish. Which means no gefilte fish. So I put on my best impression of Charlotte in Sex and the City —”I said lean!”—and managed, through a combination of moxie and charm, to get him to give me the last three pounds of whitefish and pike in Crown Heights. Plus a pound of carp. Which means…gefilte fish! Food is the easy part of the seder. […]
My one requirement: that you stay with me. I want to hear you, grumble as I may. If you were deaf I’d need what you might say If you were dumb I’d need what you might see. If you were blind I’d want you in my sight For you’re the sentry posted to my side: We’re hardly half way through this lengthy ride Remember we’re surrounded yet by night. Your ‘let me lick my wounds’ is no excuse now. Your ‘anywhere’ (not here) is no defense There’ll be relief for you, but no release now. You know whoever’s needed can’t go free And you are needed urgently by me I speak of me when us would make more sense. —Bertolt […]
From Peter Cole’s new collection of poems, The Invention of Influence, comes this little wonder, “Of Time and Intensity”: Is Time a dispersion of intensity? For epiphanists, maybe, but not for me— for whom Time is a transposition of immensity into a lower key. The republican tradition of Machiavelli—not to mention political and cultural theories of decadence—is always worried about this problem of temporal distance from a moment of origin. Conservatism is too. Sometimes. In ten words, Cole explains why these concerns may be unfounded. Peter’s not a political poet, but I always find unanticipated resources for my own thinking in his poems. I really recommend that you buy this latest collection of his.