2012

Wishing you all a good year in 2012.

Recommended film to watch while smiling, with wine, food, music, and the right kind of love and friendship (smart, witty and stalworth) is

"A Good Year"

" You'll come to see that a man learns nothing from winning. The act of losing, however, can elicit great wisdom. ... It's inevitable to lose now and again. The trick is not to make a habit of it. "

Comments Trail:

@ TNR: Peretz's latest

Jane Austen, Redux

This year's most unexpected and delightful discovery was this portrait believed to be that of Jane Austen a year or two before she died. I've never been happy with the other portraits that exist of her. Too cherubic, perhaps? In this she looks more like a Virginia Woolf. Sharp features, gaunt, triangular, severe-looking, yet elegant, face. Penetrating, all observant eyes, watching the world with an ironic glint. What is she looking at? There is some thought behind the just pursed lips, neither aloof nor unfriendly "[w]ith a great deal of quiet observation, and a knowledge, which she often wished less" ...

A Holiday Gift

Here is a much neglected Canadian movie,

The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick (1988)

It's posted in its entirely on youtube. But I love this movie for these two particular scenes:

Minute 47:00 - 50.11 - Rabbi Teitleman as stand up comedian tells people what's what.
Minute 101.00 - 106.00 - Jewish Duende ...

Comments Trail:

@ Anne's Opinions: The truth about Palestinian refugees

@ TNR: On Hitchens
Page 2

@TNR: On Obama's Middle East policies Page 2 Page 3 page 4 page 5 page 6
page7
page 8
page 9
page 11

@ The Big Picture: Without a Hitch

@ Bob's: Unwatchable violence?

Tango Hanuka

Hanuka is upon us. This year it starts on Wednesday, December 21 and ends Wednesday December 28.

This is my Hanuka song this year.

Hanukah linda sta aki,
ocho kandelas para mi,
Hanukah Linda sta aki,
ocho kandelas para mi. O...

Una kandelika, dos kandelikas,
tres kandelikas, kuatro kandelikas, sintyu kandelikas, sej kandelikas,
siete kandelikas,
ocho kandelas para mi.

Muchas fiestas vo fazer, con alegrias i plazer.
Muchas fiestas vo fazer, con alegrias i plazer. O...

Una kandelika, dos kandelikas, tres kandelikas,
kuatro kandelikas, sintyu kandelikas,
sej kandelikas, siete kandelikas, ocho kandelas para
mi.

Los pastelikos vo kumer, con almendrikas i la myel
Los pastelikos vo kumer, con almendrikas i la myel. O...

Una kandelika, dos kandelikas, tres kandelikas, kuatro kandelikas,
sintyu kandelikas, sej kandelikas, siete kandelikas, ocho
kandelas para mi.


In Israel, the feast of lights, Hanuka, is celebrated differently than it is here, in North America. In Israel we feel the approach of the holiday by the aroma of fried doughnuts, those plump, jam filled "sufganiot" whenever you walk by a patisserie, or a bakery, or any coffee house. People get out their "menorahs" to polish and prepare for the the first night, they get the colorful candles that get more creatively elegant by each year, they wish one another Happy Hanuka, there are Hanuka songs playing on the radio. Some, traditionally minded people, prepare their "Mishloach Manot", gifts of baked goods to deliver to each other. My aunt is one of those but then, she likes to bake, and welcomes the opportunity to give. What we do not do in Israel is buy gifts for Hanuka. Gift giving are reserved for the two main high holidays: Rosh Hashana and Pesach (Passover). Instead, we give out chocolate money and new dreidels (svivonim). This would be the dreidel we give in the Diaspora. And this is what we give in Israel. What a difference one letter makes.

Such is the irresistible appeal of gift giving during the Christmas season that of course here in the diaspora gifting giving during Hanuka has evolved into an inevitability.

I am not complaining.

So, what what do I want for Hanuka?

Una kandelika
dos kandelikas
tres kandelikas,
kuatro kandelikas,
sintyu kandelikas,
sej kandelikas,
siete kandelikas,
ocho kandelas

And then maybe this or that and possibly the other ...

Beautiful Hanuka is here, eight candles for me ...

Chag Urim Sameach!

Comments trail:

@ TNR: Danger Zone
Page 2

@ Norway- Israel blog about the activist who did not get enough hatred for Israel's Jews

@ The Big Picture: About Christopher Hitchens's passing and other somewhat related subjects

Chistopher Hitchens and his Vocabular Cornucopia

(A prayer of sorts)

Christopher Hitchens is playing chess with a grinning angel of death. The latter thought he had him, but not so fast, it appears. Hitchens is still going strong. Or rather, as he explains extensively in his article , weak. But going on, nonetheless.

In a short story by S.Y. Agnon, "Tehila", the author alludes humorously to a mystical theory in which each person is allotted a finite number of words to use during a lifetime. Here is the excerpt (translated by CC):

When I was a baby, I used to chatter all the time; from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed, my mouth did not stop babbling on and on. An elderly man in our neighbourhood told the people who were greatly amused by my non stop chatter: What a shame about this baby, that she is wasting all of her words in her infancy. What will remain for her old age? I heard his admonition, and was acutely alarmed. What if I woke up and I was mute on the following day. In time I figured out what he had meant. A person must take care not to squander in a short time what has been apportioned to last a lifetime. I trained myself to consider each and every word before speaking it, and thus became a miser with words. And having exercised such great frugality, I am now possessed of a cornucopia of words. I have been given an extension on my lease on life, so I can use up the balance of the words accredited to me. And now you wish me to tell you my life story and fritter away whatever I have left in my word fund. If I tell you what you want to know, I’ll be abbreviating my life duration.

The scene came to my mind as I was reading this latest article from Christopher Hitchens, overflowing with a torrent of words, associations, images, emotions. I was thinking: He will not go away before he has exhausted his entire reservoir of words to speak. He will insist on living to the very last word that he has been assigned to say. He will hold God accountable to each and every iota, dot and comma in their contract. And as it seems to me that his reservoir of as yet unused words is simply oceanic, it cannot be drained.

He has all that, on top of the other two factors that comprise that inexorable will:

"Only two things rescued me from betraying myself and letting go: a wife who would not hear of me talking in this boring and useless way, and various friends who also spoke freely. Oh, and the regular painkiller."

___________

Update: Friday morning, December 16: Christopher Hitchens is no more.

— “Right at the very end, when he was at his most feeble as this cancer began to overwhelm him, he insisted on a desk by the window away from his bed at the ICU. It took myself and his son to get him into that chair with a pole and eight lines going into his body, and there he was, a man with only a few days to live, turning out 3,000 words to meet a deadline. And then finishing it and thinking, well maybe I’ve got an hour or two, I’ll write something on Memorial Day in English poetry. [...]

His unworldly fluency never deserted him, his commitment was passionate, and he never deserted his trade. He was the consummate writer, the brilliant friend. In Walter Pater's famous phrase, he burned "with this hard gem-like flame". Right to the end."

— Novelist Ian McEwan told BBC.

David Frum's obituary is worth mentioning:

"By the end, the one-time Trotskyist doctrinaire allowed no furnishings inside his mind except those that he had deliberately chosen and then shaped to his own use.

One sometimes hears of people who try to model their writing or their persona on Christopher Hitchens’ example. The results are usually absurd and sometimes perverse. Christopher did not offer a model of what to think. He offered a model of how to think – and how to live. Fully. Fearlessly. Joyously. And then, alas too soon, of how to die: without bluster but without flinching, boldly writing until the fingers moved no more."

Comment Trail:

@ TNR: Marty Peretz's through a glass, darkly.
Page 2

@ The Big Picture: A modest prophecy about OWS

@ Harry's Place: On the question of newting: Are Palestinians an invented people?

@ TNR about William Carlos Williams

@ Commentary: Rushing to Gutman's Defense

My comment (pending moderation):

There is a kernel of truth in Gutman's diagnosis. The kind of virulent Muslim antisemitism that we see in Europe and elsewhere is indeed fed by Palestinian animosity towards "Zionists" whom they just happen to misname as: "Yahud" . As we can see in the following example, cited by the Israeli journalist Ben Dror Yemini:

"Two researchers, Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik of “Palestinian Media Watch”, published recently a book “Deception”, in which they chronicle the systematic incitement to hatred against Israel and Jews under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority.

Some of the evidence is already well-known, since the nineties when there was a joint Palestinian-Israeli committee for the prevention of incitement. The state of affairs, however, is going from bad to worse. Here is one example: The PA subsidizes a monthly youth magazine entitled “Zaizafoona” (name of a forest tree). Last summer that magazine carried a story written by a young girl about an imaginary encounter with four ideal historical personages: The first is the eighth century Persian mathematician Al-Khwaizmi (from whose name the terms "algorism" and "algorithm" are derived. The second admirable figure is the great Muslim conqueror Salahdin. The third is the Egyptian author and Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfuz. From each encounter with the each figure, the young author learns something that contributes to forming her thinking and future endeavours. Then there is another historical figure in this roster of historical model figures: Hitler. And Hitler tells her: “I killed the Jews because I wanted everyone in the world to know that this is a destructive nation, that wreaks havoc and death upon the entire world”.*

The story is well integrated into other stories in that magazine that ostensibly speaks for values taken from the Human Rights discourse, and combined with Islamic, Arab and Palestinian pride. Until they get to Jews. Then it is another matter. Jews are evil beasts worthy of extermination. And in that context, Hitler morphs into a laudable figure. There is no editorial qualification accompanying the story, that would clarify to the reader about who Hitler was, or what Nazism is, or what the Holocaust was."

http://www.nrg.co.il/app/index.php?do=blog&encr_id=f2b4c1b55be76d1e6d7b777256ea0370&id=3068

Such virulence spreads by contagion, easily, among Muslims and Arabs. Where the good ambassador is wrong is in his displacement of the cause on to the Israelis. It is the Palestinian side of the conflict and their many fans in Europe that stimulate this kind of antisemitism, that for some reason they pretend serves the "peace process", or whatever it is that the Palestinians are after.

As in the case of the notorious "come back to Israel" ad campaign, Goldberg lacks the acumen to zero in on the real story. In his silly analogies and interpretations he reminds me of the meticulous editor who goes to a great deal of trouble to separate the wheat from the chaff and then publishes the chaff.

___________

Update December 14: The following story provides another proof of how antisemitism works in Europe today. The person who makes these accusations about Jews is a Turkish Belgian "Human Rights" activist:

"These people [the Jews] can get away with anything because they have money and financial power, but they also exploit our guilt [meaning the Holocaust]."

It comes to a point that whenever I read "anti-racist" I brace myself for some antisemitic rant following.

______________

* Update, December 25, 2011: (Comment by davem):

The magazine’s director, Shareef Samhan, did not dispute the translation, though he said the girl was “accusing” Hitler and not praising him. He said he had not been aware of the text and noted that Unesco was not a central backer of the magazine.

Hrmmmm.

توجهت للباب الثاني كان ينتظرني هناك هتلر
قلت: انت من قتل اليهود
قال: نعم و لقد قتلتهم حتى تعرفوا انهم قوم يعيثون فسادا في الارض. وانا اطلب منك الصبر و التحمل لما تلقاه فلسطين من عذاب على ايديهم
قلت: شكرا على النصيحة

which PMW have corrextly translated as

I turned to the next door; there Hitler awaited me. I said, ‘You’re the one who killed the Jews?’
He [Hitler] said: ‘Yes. I killed them so you would all know that they are a nation which spreads destruction all over the world. And what I ask of you is to be resilient and patient, concerning the suffering that Palestine is experiencing at their hands.’
I said [to Hitler]: ‘Thanks for the advice.’

About Palestinians Hearting Hitler and other kinds of Plagues

Ben Dror Yemini, in his weekly Column in the Israeli daily "Ma'ariv", tackles four burning issues:

The case of the legislation aimed at curbing contributions from foreign countries to fund politically hostile NGO's active in Israel. He says: If France were to transfer funds to finance the British version of "Breaking the silence" NGO , the French ambassador would be expelled from Britain that very same day.

The manipulation from the Human rights factory "Yesh Din": When into the human Rights discourse you insert such terms as "war crimes" the result is not a reinforcement for the rule of law, or necessary criticism ina Democratic ethos. The result is another contribution to the industry of lies and slanders and de-legitimization of Israel.

About Hillary Clinton's criticism of the Haredi camp in Israel that is marching towards an Iranian model: Ben Dror supports Clinton's worries and again warns against the "talibanization" of the religious sector in Israeli society which has always stood for "Torah and labour".

About the launching of the book Deception: Betraying the Peace Process, authored by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik.

I picked out only the segment on "Deception" for (unauthorized) translation:

"Prof. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, the author of a number of controversial and thought-provoking books, resigned in 2003 from Harvard to focus on researching and writing about genocide. According to Goldhagen, his interest focussed on what, do mass killings have in common and in resulted in his 2009 book Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity, about the global nature of genocide, and how to avert such crimes against humanity. In this book he examines the reasons and circumstances of 150 million killed or in fact slaughtered and exterminated, even when they were nor combatants or soldiers. According to Goldhagen, every mass massacre is preceded by systematic and mass brain washing, a long process of warranting genocide.

Israel averts its gaze, but right alongside us, practically within us, an on-going mass brain-washing campaign is taking place. Two researchers, Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik of “Palestinian Media Watch”, published recently a book “Deception”, in which they chronicle the systematic incitement to hatred against Israel and Jews under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority.

Some of the evidence is already well-known, since the nineties when there was a joint Palestinian-Israeli committee for the prevention of incitement. The state of affairs, however, is going from bad to worse. Here is one example: The PA subsidizes a monthly youth magazine entitled “Zaizafoona” (name of a forest tree). Last summer that magazine carried a story written by a young girl about an imaginary encounter with four ideal historical personages: The first is the eighth century Persian mathematician Al-Khwaizmi (from whose name the terms "algorism" and "algorithm" are derived. The second admirable figure is the great Muslim conqueror Salahdin. The third is the Egyptian author and Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfuz. From each encounter with the each figure, the young author learns something that contributes to forming her thinking and future endeavours. Then there is another historical figure in this roster of historical model figures: Hitler. And Hitler tells her: “I killed the Jews because I wanted everyone in the world to know that this is a destructive nation, that wreaks havoc and death upon the entire world”.

The story is well integrated into other stories in that magazine that ostensibly speaks for values taken from the Human Rights discourse, and combined with Islamic, Arab and Palestinian pride. Until they get to Jews. Then it is another matter. Jews are evil beasts worthy of extermination. And in that context, Hitler morphs into a laudable figure. There is no editorial qualification accompanying the story, that would clarify to the reader about who Hitler was, or what Nazism is, or what the Holocaust was.

“Deception” is packed with similar alarming examples, mostly recorded in the last few years, with a large part of them under the leadership of the most moderate duo, Mahmoud Abbass and Salem Fayad. But It is not only they who subsidize this periodical that encourages admiration for Hitler; funding was also provided by UNESCO.

This brainwashing is dangerous. Abbass and Fayad deserve some credit that at this stage -- and they always emphasize that only at this stage -- they control the organized violence. They were the main losers of that violence, anyway. But they are also helping in the process of justifying genocide. They assist in cultivating a new young generation full of virulent hatred in the style of the old anti-Semitism.

A large part of the financing of publications that feature hateful propaganda comes from the European Union, and individual European countries. In this matter no legislation can help stem the tide. In this matter what is urgently needed is very active diplomacy. The Foreign Ministry, for starters, can send out a synopsis of this book “Deception”, or even the book itself, to every organization, group, association, or foundation, and to each country in the West that are complicit in subsidizing this kind of dangerous brain washing. Fascism and anti-Semitism must be stopped. And certainly not financed. "

Or, as my cyber friend Terry Glavin would say: "¡No pasarán!

About the troubled (to put it mildly) relationship between UNESCO and Israel, I wrote here.

Comment Trail:

@ TNR Peretz: Defending Israel against

@ Norway, Israel and the Jews: Sorrowing for a would be murderer

@ TNR: Israelis do not trust Obama on Iran

Etgar Keret

"“His whole body was completely still, except the wings, which were still fluttering a little, like when someone dies. That's when he finally understood that of all the things the angel had told him, nothing was true. That he wasn't even an angel, just a liar with wings.”
― Etgar Keret

Yesterday as we were driving to an afternoon "Season's Greetings" party, we happened to hear on the radio an interview with an Israeli author whose name, Etgar Keret, sounded vaguely familiar but not anyone I ever read. I mentioned in the past that I do not like to read Hebrew literature with the one exception. Keret seems to be in the same genre as that exception, of writing bizarre, implausible, even irrational plots mixed with mundane recognizable reality, suffused with humour but containing horror and anguish.

As a child, he once recalled in another interview, he avoided crying or displaying any pain; he felt that no pain of his could compare to the suffering his parents had to survive and besides, he wished to spare them additional sorrow. That is why he began to write, he explained: in order to find a "hidden shelter" from life itself.

In the interview, Keret explained the meaning of his name: "Etgar" means challenge in Hebrew, and "Keret" is a Biblical synonym for "big city". So, he said, his name in English would be: Urban Challenge.

According to this article, "Keret’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and thus witnessed firsthand one of the most demonic transformations of the past century: the collapse of Germany’s civil society and the rise of Adolph Hitler’s genocidal dictatorship. Keret is fully aware of how his parents’ experience has shaped his world-view, and also slightly dismissive of its impact.

“You know, you go through your life thinking that you carry specific scars that other people don’t have, and then you date somebody whose father was a drunk who beat her up, and you know that everybody has some sort of difficult dialogue with their parents’ history and behaviour,” he says. “I remember that I once came home from school, when I was in elementary school, and I quoted my teacher, who said that anybody who didn’t experience the Holocaust wouldn’t be able to understand it. My father was very annoyed by this notion, and he said, ‘Why did she say that? Do you think that people in the Holocaust had a different set of emotions and feelings than you do?’ And he said, ‘If you know what it means to be afraid, or if you know what it feels like to be hungry, then you can know how it felt. You just have to multiply it a hundred times, and you’ll know exactly how it felt.’ ”

In the interview on the CBC radio, he explained that he was the youngest of three children. His older brother taught him to read when he was three years old. This same brother became a Radical Left activist in Israel. His sister went on to "convert" to ultra orthodox Judaism and for a while lived in a religious settlement in the West Bank. Just your typical, mainstream, middle of the road Israeli family.

Here is a short article by Etgar Keret, published on Tablet Magazine. It is a nice illustration of his special voice:

"When I was a kid, I used to try to imagine Poland. My mother, who grew up in Warsaw, told me quite a few stories about the city, about Yerushalayem Boulevard (Aleja Jerozolimskie), where she was born and played as a little girl, about the ghetto where she spent her childhood years trying to survive and where she lost her entire family. Apart from one blurred photograph in my older brother’s history book that showed a tall, mustached man and a horse-drawn carriage in the background, I had no reality-based images of that distant country, but my need to imagine the place where my mother grew up and where my grandparents and uncle are buried was strong enough to keep me trying to create it in my mind. I pictured streets like the ones I saw in illustrations in Dickens’ novels. In my mind, the churches my mother told me about were right out of a musty old copy of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I could imagine her walking down those cobblestone streets, careful not to bump into tall, mustached men, and all the images I invented were always in black and white.

My first encounter with the real Poland took place a decade ago when I was invited to the Warsaw Book Fair. I remember feeling surprise when I walked out of the airport, a reaction I couldn’t account for at the moment. Later, I realized that I had been surprised that the Warsaw spread before me was alive in Technicolor, that the roads were full of cheap Japanese cars, not horse-drawn carriages, and yes, also that most of the people I saw were utterly clean-shaven.

Over the past decade, I traveled to Poland almost every year. I kept getting invitations to visit and, although I had generally been cutting down on flying, I found it hard to refuse the Poles. Although most of my family had perished under horrendous circumstances there, Poland was also the place where they had lived and thrived for generations, and my attraction to that land and its people was almost mystic. I went looking for the house my mother was born in and found a bank there. I went to another house where she had spent a year of her life and found that it was now a grassy field. Strangely enough, I didn’t feel frustrated or sad, and even took pictures of both sites. True, I would rather have found a house instead of a bank or a field. But a bank, I thought, was better than nothing.

During my last visit to Poland a few weeks ago, for a book festival in another part of the country, a charming photographer named Elzbieta Lempp asked if she could take my picture. I agreed happily. She photographed me in a café where I was waiting for my reading to take place, and when I returned to Israel, I found that she had emailed me a copy of the picture. It was a black-and-white shot of me talking to a tall, mustached man. Behind us, out of focus, was an old building. Everything in the photograph seemed to be taken not from reality, but from my childhood imaginings of Poland. Even the expression on my face looked Polish and frighteningly serious. I stared at the image. If I could have unfrozen my photographed self from his pose, he could have walked right out of the frame and actually found the house where my mother was born. If he were brave enough, he might even have knocked on the door. And who knows who would have opened it for him: the grandmother or grandfather I never knew, maybe even a smiling little girl who had no idea what the cruel future had in store for her. I stared at the picture for quite a while, until my 5-year-old son came into the room and saw me sitting there, eyes glued to the computer screen. “How come that picture has no colors?” he asked. “It’s magic,” I smiled and ruffled his hair."

Can anyone be this stupid?

To arrive at this level of stupidity and ignorance you need to be a "professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley."

Note to Snoopy: Please not a word of admonition. He is, as Prof. Higgins would say, so deliciously vulgar. So horribly dirty-minded. So perversely hateful. So sublimely unintelligent. He is practically irresistible.

Comments trail:

@ Simply Jews: Table manners

@ Mick Hartley: The law of rape

@ TNR: Thought the Muslim Brotherhood Was Bad? Meet Egypt’s Other Islamist Party.

@ The Big Picture: A poem and a reading

@ Bob's: The politics of rape or absence of

Jeffrey Goldberg's complaint: There is no value to the Jewish state

What to make of Jeffrey Goldberg's hysterical screed at Netanyahu, again. In his post he screams:

"Netanyahu Government Suggests Israelis Avoid Marrying American Jews"

I don't know. I watched the ads he posted and others, and in none of them have I seen the slightest indication that Netanyahu's Government Suggests Israelis Avoid Marrying American Jews. What I have seen is an appeal to Israelis living abroad to return home, so that their children can grow up Israelis, rooted in their Israel's national culture and way of life.

One would have thought Goldberg would agree that Israel expects nothing more nor less than to be treated as a normal country, that is, for the world to give unto the Jews in their homeland what is freely and unstintingly given unto all Christians in mainly Christian lands and unto all Muslims in Muslim lands.

So, when Jeffrey Goldberg, whose undiscriminating anger at Netanyahu's government makes him stupid (because, as I always say, anger makes you stupid) says:

"How about, "Hey, come back to Israel, because our unemployment rate is half that of the U.S.'s"? Or, "It's always sunny in Israel"? Or, "Hey, Shmulik, your mother misses you"?

I have to wonder: where in that roster can we find Israel's exceptionalism for its expatriate sons and daughters? Is he saying that the only "legitimate" appeal to Israelis who live abroad is to be found in sun, lower unemployment rates and overreaching Jewish mothers? What makes Israel unique to Israelis in this poorly imagined list? Are we Israelis not to be allowed to be ourselves, to celebrate what is uniquely ours, to grieve together for our fallen? If not, then what do we need a Jewish state for? For sun we can go to Florida or Spain, for lesser unemployment rates we could try China or Brazil, for overreaching Jewish mothers we can go to New York. Why should there be Israel, or Israeli Jewish society?

Is it too much of a leap for me to suggest that Goldberg's rationale, in not sentiment, in this case echoes that of Ahmadinejad? What I hear is a modified version of what Ahmadinejad is saying about Israel: There is no value to the Jewish state qua a Jewish state.

Jeff Goldberg, in the spirit of terrified meanness, writes this scathing post. As if the cheesy, anodyne ad campaign were in any way a comment on or criticism of American Jews, on America or on Christmas. Give me a bloody break.

________

Update: "Yet in the hysteria of the response, the insecurity of American Jewish life is laid bare. This, rather than the campaign itself, is the real story."