September 29- On scurrilous letter re: France as anti-Semitic

Have you been receiving the same internet nonsense I have? It purports to inform of the horrors afflicting the Jews in France. In Lyon a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire; the Jewish religious center in Montpellier was firebombed; on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris the words “Dirty Jew” were painted. Other atrocities are listed. All of this happened in the past week, we are told. No wonder French Jews are fleeing to the relative safety of Israel. We are urged to boycott French products and its shores. We can exert amazing pressure, the broadside reads, “and whatever else we may know about the French, we most certainly know that they are like a cobweb in a hurricane in the face of well directed pressure.” We are urged to send this message along to our family, our friends and co-workers.

OK, friends and family and co-workers, you can stop sending me this; I’ve seen it.

Is any of it true? Well, yes, the specific events did happen. But they happened not this week, but in April 2002 at the height of the Intifada. The culprits were not French Frenchmen; they were Muslim immigrants, or the children of immigrants, mostly poor, religious and susceptible to violence. Some few of them saw what their co-religionists were doing in Israel, they felt solidarity with them, and they acted. Once the attacks began the French police protected Jewish institutions throughout the country and prosecuted captured felons and the attacks ceased.

Did French Jews panic? No. They took reasonable precautions, as did the Jews of Rhode Island after the recent shooting at the Seattle Jewish Federation, and continued to live their lives. There was no mass Jewish emigration from France to Israel.

When Muslims rioted in France in the fall of 2005, again the Jewish community did not panic. “Manek Weintraub, of the Representative Council of the Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) told the British website TotallyJewish.com, ‘So far nothing has happened. There was a Molotov cocktail that seems to have been hurled at a small synagogue but nobody really knows about it. It [the riots] will concern the public authorities but Jews are largely absent from the story, which is welcome.’”

This does not sound like panic to me.

So who wrote the “Jews are being led to the slaughter in France!” piece that has crossed your desk and mine? Answer: Not my cousin, not my friend, my not my co-worker, they just took the bait, believed the hype and passed it on. Who does that leave? Someone with an agenda, perhaps? One source could be Arutz Sheva (Channel Seven), a right wing Israeli online media network banned by the Israeli government because of racist incitement. In fact, a quick Google search confirms that it was broadcasting this material in 2005. But where did it get it? As early as April 2002 there was a similar piece going around the internet, purportedly from Senator Joseph Lieberman. It contained the same information. But Lieberman didn’t write the letter; it was a forgery. So who’s responsible for that? Perhaps someone who is angry at France for not supporting America’s attack on Iraq, someone angry enough to object to the fact that France was right (as the government in Washington now fully admits) that there never were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that Saddam Hussein never cooperated with Al Qaeda, that he and Osama hated each other. The French knew all this and spoke up. They must be punished.

Is France, after all, the only country recently to experience anti-semitic acts? “Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, Inc.” (no, I’m not making this up) issued a broadside on December 8, 2003 listing thirteen recent acts of anti-Semitism in Europe (two in Belgium, four in Britain, two in Italy, one each in Germany, Ukraine, Greece, Holland, Slovakia.) And then it comes to the point: “But nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France” and then it gives the usual old examples. What does “Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership” advocate? My initial guess (considering the source) was “Pack a Rod, Plug a Frog” but no, boycott etc. just as the original letter with the identical words urges.

Am I the only one smelling a rat here? Aren’t there anti-Semites in all countries, including or own? (Seattle, anyone? The LA nursery school shooter?) Bad things happen in even the most wonderful places. Vive La France.

September 15- Lessons about proportionate response to kidnapping from the Iliad

The return of the Jewish New Year is happening with increasing frequency, or so it seems. Already I can taste the flavors of my wife’s cooking and hear the Rosh Hashanah-only tunes. We have survived 5766. As a child I used to think of God sitting with an open book on His lap deciding who should live and inscribing the names of the fortunate. Now, as an adult, I see no evidence that He isn’t, so like the famous wager of Pascal, I’ll bet on the side of belief and see if it pays off.

Jews are Janus-faced this time of year. We look backward to see forward. I always look backward; I’m an historian. It’s an occupational hazard. Last week I was teaching about the ancient Greeks. I told them the story of the contest between Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena. Each wanted the golden apple inscribed “To the Fairest.” Zeus refused to choose—he was as dull witted as he was strong and randy, but he wasn’t insane enough to get involved in this no-win (for him) situation. Instead they sought out a man, and asked him. Naturally a mere mortal couldn’t choose the most beautiful among the three goddesses, so each tendered a bribe. Hera, offered power; Athena, wisdom; Aphrodite, the most beautiful of women. Paris, a prince of Troy tending sheep (his father had received a prophesy when he was born that he would be responsible for the destruction of Troy; rather than kill the infant he gave him to a shepherd to do it; these things never work out, of course) chose Aphrodite who delivered on her promise. But she had failed to tell the young, foolish, man, that the woman promised would be Helen (she of the face that was soon to launch a thousand ships) already married to Menelaus, the warlike king of Sparta, scion of the cursed race of Atreus. They met while he was on grand tour following his punishment. When Menelaus was away, they stole off, landing safely in Troy, but bringing in their wake those self-same thousand ships filled with Greeks, determined to get her back.

There were those in Troy who told Paris to return the girl, that she wasn’t worth the price, but Paris being vainglorious, and knowing that no one could force him to return Helen, insisted on keeping his prize. The Greeks eventually came and destroyed the city.

As I was telling the students this familiar story, it occurred to me, mid-sentence: Can there be a more analogous situation in literature to what happened in the Middle East this summer? Hezbollah stole into our territory, stole our two soldiers (thinking, it is now revealed, that there would be no consequences). Many prominent Lebanese asked, begged, for the soldiers to be released, but Hezbollah refused, in its arrogance, and Lebanon was bombarded, its infrastructure devastated.

In the ancient story as told by Homer, the end of the war was not ambiguous. The Greeks, love ’em or hate ’em, knew what they were after and settled for no less than the return of their hostage (yes, Helen was a willing hostage, but even she yearned to return to Sparta).

When I teach the Iliad I usually root for the Trojans, especially for their great hero Hector. The Greeks, it’s always seemed to me, were the arrogant Yankees, the Trojans the noble Brooklyn Dodgers, doomed to fail gallantly. But now, now the Greeks are still the Yankees, the Trojans still the Dodgers, but current events allow me to view the past with a different perspective. When they steal your people, you have to go in and get them back. Innocent Trojans died; innocent Lebanese died. They should have taken control of their destinies by forcing Hezbollah to give up the captured soldiers, by forcing Paris to give back Helen. If Israel’s response was disproportionate, it was just acting as people always do, when they can, when their people are snatched up.

At year’s end, year’s beginning, let me end where I started, with a New Year’s reflection. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak to you, to pique your curiosity, occasionally to entertain, not infrequently to annoy (apparently). One day I’m going to trade in this old Olivetti portable electric typewriter, but not yet. Shanna Tova; may 5767 be for us a year of love and joy, peace and prosperity, good health and the wonder of discovery. Be strong and resolute, Haverim.

Response to David Klinghoffer on the religious right

Every once in a while I hear the ground rumble. Usually it’s my mother turning over in her grave as I commit one faux pas or another. It’s nice to know that she’s keeping an eye on me. But when it happened a couple of weeks ago, I checked and no, it wasn’t her this time, it was old Abraham Cahan.

Cahan (1860-1951) established the Jewish Forward in 1897. His paper espoused socialist principles. The rights of the workingman, the release from the superstitions of the religious, were his rallying cries. The newspaper was also a way to Americanize his readers. Yes, it was written in Yiddish, but the goal was to turn the children and grandchildren of immigrants into the American doctors, lawyers, dentists, teachers, union activists that they became. “It is as important to teach the reader to carry a handkerchief in his pocket as it is to teach him to carry a union card,” he famously wrote.

So what made him turn over in his grave? Probably the piece by David Klinghoffer who began his August 18th column in the “Forward” with “Some members of America’s political and cultural elite…” This is code wording for liberals, we élitists not in touch with the common man; it’s a word “compassionate conservatives” (as opposed to the usual kind, I suppose) use to slur liberals who, as far as I can tell, are the people who speak for the underclasses in America—the poor, the worker, the black, the immigrant.

OK, so what are we élitists doing today, according to Klinghoffer? We are confusing the political philosophy of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and America’s religious conservatives. Who knew? And we are wrong to think of Bush, Jr. etc. as attempting to impose an Iranian style theocracy on America. As a former colleague of his at the “National Review” argues, disingenuously, “even the most ambitious members of the so-called Christian right wish to do nothing more radical than return the United States to the status quo of the 1950s” and that was certainly not a theocracy.

Ah, the 1950s, I remember them well. Bible-thumping ministers denouncing integration, voting for the likes of Orville Faubus, Ross Barnett, and George “segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever” Wallace. It was a quieter, gentler time when Mrs. Hollman, my fourth grade teacher, would start our day at PS193 by reading form the from Psalms, but other teachers across the country began their classes with the Lord’s Prayer. The words “Under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance, though the pledge’s author, Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister, had deliberately omitted them. But even in the 1950s I don’t remember anyone teaching creationism in school or even the deceptively re-coined version of it “intelligent design.” That throwback to the 1920s had to wait until our own enlightened time, foisted upon us by the Christian right, if they can get away with it. I don’t remember in the 1950s arguments that religious symbols such as the Ten Commandments, should be emblazoned on public property, but I do remember that come Christmas we Jewish students of PS 193 learned to sing “Silent Night, Holy Night” as well as “Jingle Bells.” I loved being excluded from the rest of America, didn’t you?

Klinghoffer argues that we élitists miss the point that some of biblical law is essentially natural law—thou shall not murder, thou shall not steal, etc. Fine, so we don’t need religion to teach it. The Ten Commandments begins, “I am the Lord Your God…” how in conformity with the first amendment’s separation of church and state is that, festooned behind the judge? And what kind of God does it mean? The unitary God of Jews and Muslims? The Trinity of Christianity? The Divine Spirit of Reason preached by natural law philosophers such as Cicero? These are the kind of questions people kill each other over, each certain that he has the correct answer and that the others are infidels (or, to cite Klinghoffer in another context, “pagans.” A blurb for a forthcoming book reads: “Addressing such timely topics as the controversy over public displays of the Commandments and the battles over Intelligent Design, Klinghoffer demonstrates that Christians and Jews are united in their opposition to the pagan aspects of our culture.”) Oh, Zeus, why do you not strike such people with your thunderbolt? That’s the trouble with Zeus. He’s never around when we need him.

No wonder poor Abe Cahan is rolling over in his grave.