Weekly Items of Note (4/6)
David Shasha
1. Here is yet another example of the self-destruction that is taking place in the Sephardic community of New York:
What we see here is the very well-connected and powerful Rabbi Elie Abadie of the Safra Synagogue in the Manhattan Syrian Jewish community giving all his support to reactionary Right Wing Zionism and by implication the Ashkenazim who have so cruelly undermined our traditions. How kindly he speaks of the vile Alan Dershowitz!
It should be recalled that Rabbi Abadie was involved in a controversy over the lecture of a radical Settler leader named Nadia Matar that took place in his Synagogue:
After pressure from the media there was a half-hearted retraction of the program that he and his Synagogue hosted:
Sadly, rather than fighting on behalf of a Sephardic tradition that is today on life-support, what we are seeing is a fanatical identification with the state of Israel, as if Israel was not itself part of the massive Ashkenazi attempt to subvert the culture and history of Arab Jews. The institutions that are mentioned in the course of Rabbi Abadie’s letter on behalf of what he believes to be the interests of Zionism are all part of the Sephardic community’s Ashkenazification process; marking the failure of the community to build any religious institutions that seek to preserve its literary-intellectual heritage.
Instead what we have seen all too many times is the devotion of Sephardim to the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox paradigm which has ultimately served not only to undermine our traditional values, but to open the door to the internal conflict between Modern Orthodoxy and its Haredi counterpart.
It is by now an open secret that the Haredim are winning, but what we see in both a de jure and de facto way is that those who control the institutions – and the massive amount of money that flows in elite philanthropic circles – refuse to relinquish what has been a failed strategy. Indeed, what we see in this article is a redoubling of the Ashkenazi agenda and a relinquishing of what little is left of the Sephardic heritage.
I have addressed many of the issues involving the way Sephardim have adopted the Ashkenazi Orthodox agenda and its residual anti-Arab hatred and the fierce allegiance to Zionism above all else in the following article on Rabbi Meir Mazuz:
For further background on this failure please make note of the following SHU posts. I have added the names of the posts for greater ease in navigation:
“The Idiot Sephardim: A Confrontation between a Sephardic Student and a Yeshiva University Professor”
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/idiot/davidshasha/nbuhc_7BNZI/I6yF0qSYtWAJ
“The Stale Winds of Summer: The ‘Idiot Sephardim’ Refuse to Get Off the Titanic”
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/idiot/davidshasha/I5LcowTL5kE/bx_QWqljEOIJ
Alexandra Hootnick, “A Rising Tide of Sephardic Jews Brings Change to the Yeshiva of Flatbush”
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/hootnick/davidshasha/UZ9tN7Z2TAY/8pk5tGyNP4sJ
SHU Special Newsletter: Hakham Matloub Abadi
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/matloub/davidshasha/dpebJezm5Ic/rvQ82UnIALkJ
“A Broken Frame: Sephardi Occlusion and the Repairing of Jewish Dysfunction”
Such self-hating Sephardim have dedicated themselves to supporting the Ashkenazim with all due diligence at the very time that their own cultural traditions are evaporating.
2. There has been a deeply correlative effect between
ongoing advances in technology, the gap between the haves and have-nots, and
the dumbing-down of our society.
A new piece of technology speaks to the issue in dramatic terms:
http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/13/technology/innovation/spritz/
Tech entrepreneurs now want to bring back was once called “speed-reading”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Wood_(teacher)
The idea that we can speed up the reading process does not speak to the nature of cognitive perception. It is about saving time rather than having a better understanding and aesthetic-intellectual appreciation of the material being read.
It is not surprising to see such tech entrepreneurs trying to make money, just as it is not surprising to see people who have generally abandoned intellectual pursuits through reading books trying to make that activity even less time-consuming that it is at the moment.
I am often told in the course of doing my work that people simply do not read anymore. What better indication of that than a renewed effort at bringing speed-reading back into a culture of aggressive anti-intellectualism.
3. One of the most horrifying sketches from Dave Chappelle’s long-defunct show was his parody of MTV’s degenerate “The Real World”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hM3_uLzu64
The sketch presents African-Americans as criminal thugs who appear to be wreaking their collective vengeance on White people with no moral compunction.
The sketch reaches its climax when two of the African-American thugs, after having sex with the young White girl whose boyfriend is presented as weak, emasculated, and helpless, stab the boyfriend’s father in the side while the young White woman looks on laughing.
Chappelle in his perverse way was doing two things at the same time: he was trying to express the desperate feeling among African-Americans when their own women were “violated” by White men while they were powerless to do anything about it. In this case the ante is raised by the fact that the White girl is complicit; being sexually attracted by the criminal thugs and being a willing participant in the sex act.
At the same time Chappelle is presenting a view of the African-American community as being used by corporate media like MTV as little more than animals.
The sequence is particularly disconcerting because of its fusion of sex and violence in a way that is hard to process in moral terms. It speaks to the way in which relationships between Whites and African-Americans have become perverted by certain assumptions and expectations.
Criminality has become an erotic illusion, an alluring sexual fantasy for White “bad girls” who are then seen as “Ho’s” and “Sluts” by African-American males who are chained to a process that serves to undermine their own human dignity. The process forces African-Americans – particularly males – into becoming vulgar stereotypes in order to earn money and receive respect from the White world.
I was reminded of Chappelle when watching a sketch on last week’s Saturday Night Live called “Black Jeopardy:”
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/black-jeopardy/2768586
The sketch featured two African-American panelists, an African-American host, and a White professor of African-American studies. The basic premise of the sketch was that African-Americans have an ignorant insider culture whose references are not known by White people.
The sketch spoke to the larger dilemma of White-Black relations and what culture means today.
Do Blacks now have their own culture that is kept off-limits to White people?
Or is it just an attack on out-of-touch old White people, even those who claim to study African-American history and culture?
What does it mean at present to be an African-American and how does that identity fit into the larger American culture?
As with the Chappelle sketch, what we are seeing is an extremely complex cultural-cognitive process that has White corporations manipulating images of African-Americans to the point where it is often difficult to distinguish between reality and representation.
Robert Townsend addressed the issue in his now largely-forgotten movie “Hollywood Shuffle”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Shuffle
The movie took on the vulgarization of African-Americans represented in the entertainment industry as criminal thugs, an image which has sadly become even more relevant in our current culture than it was when Townsend first made the movie.
It is worthwhile to note that both Chappelle and Townsend kind of disappeared from the culture for a while and have not continued their work of critique, while at the same time the things they were commenting on have become an accepted part of the culture that was a key part of the “Black Jeopardy” sketch.
I did not have to look very far for examples of the corruption and the confusion it has created as I wrote the first draft of this note:
http://financialjuneteenth.com/rapper-2-chainz-being-sued-for-humiliating-a-woman-on-camera/
It is often hard to distinguish between parody and reality in a world where African-Americans have become pawns in a corporate commercial enterprise that finds it safe and extremely profitable to present them as criminals and degenerates.
I have covered many of these issues in my essay “Violent Words in African-American Culture”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/dyson/davidshasha/7ukJpjVEHxI/34U6-GGeSyIJ
4. I have recently been noticing an increasing panic in the HASBARAH world which has taken the form of the “I know you are but what am I” game played by children:
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7891
The basic idea is to take the attacks being made on Zionism and turn them back on the Palestinians and their supporters. Here we see the accusation of Apartheid that is routinely made by anti-Zionists being deployed against the Palestinians.
Whether this shift represents desperation and fear on the part of the HASBARAH crowd is not yet completely clear, but it does speak at minimum to an anxiety in that community that is beginning to become manifest.
5. New York Times music critic Nate Chinen has a comprehensive portrait of the brilliant Bluegrass band Nickel Creek who have recently reunited and have just released a new CD and are embarking on a concert tour:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/arts/music/after-solo-projects-nickel-creek-reunites.html?ref=arts
Nickel Creek is one of the most important American bands of the past 25 years and their reunion album and tour are highly anticipated events.
6. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott has written a baffling piece on gentrification in Brooklyn that takes the prize for the most tortuous piece of thinking this week:
The essay perfectly encapsulates the confusion of a new generation of pretentious hipsters who seem to have created an alternative society built on the crumbling ruins of what American corporations and Wall Street have decimated. Scott’s discussion tries to come to some rational understanding of how the purportedly-progressive crowd of well-to-do hipsters deals with their less-fortunate fellow citizens.
It is a crowd that protests the new Barclays Center sports-entertainment complex and then becomes its primary patrons.
We are reminded of how all this works in the vile Jon Caramanica’s typically-perverse review of Lady Gaga’s recent concert at the Roseland Ballroom:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/arts/music/on-stage-lady-gagas-artistry-endures.html?ref=arts
Caramanica presents Gaga as vapid and hollow – the perfect embodiment of the plastic culture we now live in; a culture that is a vain simulacrum of the past and which dutifully serves corporate interests as it pompously trumpets socially-progressive values. The fierce allegiance of Lady Gaga’s audience mirrors the socio-cultural dysfunction that can be interpreted as a new class struggle; a struggle that has been turned on its head by the hipsters who are as comfortable with the anti-Fracking movement as with their Goldman Sachs portfolios.
7. For those not familiar with the self-hating JIMENA organization, it is one of a number of Arab Jewish institutions designed to dutifully work inside the Ashkenazi-dominated Jewish world with its uncritical support for Zionism and for an agenda driven by a ubiquitous concern with Anti-Semitism:
JIMENA is, naturally, extreme in its Islamophobia and hatred of Arabs, seeking to reinforce the idea that Arabs are naturally Anti-Semitic in a way that is purportedly based on the experience of native Middle Eastern Jews. It promotes a deeply fatalistic and lachrymose version of Arab Jewish history. The group is at the forefront of the attack on the integrity of our culture and history, preferring instead to support the vision of the Ashkenazim, whose many sins against our community are routinely ignored or glossed over.
Almost on cue, the group recently stood up to defend Israel in light of the recent “Zionism Unsettled” controversy:
http://www.jimena.org/jews-from-arab-countries-respond-to-zionism-unsettled/
As is their usual way, JIMENA forcefully presented the standard Zionist position on Middle Eastern Jewish history, neglecting the role of Zionism and Israel in the discussion. Its practical aim is to divorce Arab Jews from the Arab world and to situate them exclusively in that of the Ashkenazim.
The group held a program on the Iraqi Jewish archive question this past Monday:
https://www.facebook.com/events/365300610275707/?ref=22
It is interesting that the discussion was moderated by the radical extremist ideologue Nat Lewin.
For those not familiar with Mr. Lewin, he is a well-connected Washington lawyer who is a militant supporter of the Jewish institutional community and its racist agenda:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Lewin
http://www.hadassahmagazine.org/site/apps/nlnet/content.aspx?c=twI6LmN7IzF&b=5698175&ct=13660723
He has come out in favor of killing members of suspected terrorists’ families for deterrent purposes:
http://www.come-and-hear.com/editor/br-lewin-shma/index.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jul/13/local/me-jewsuicide13
Like Alan Dershowitz, he has defended a number of odious figures in the Jewish community:
http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2012/10/nathan-lewin-prevaricates-again-123.html
It is to be expected that Lewin will oversee a discussion that will reinforce the interests of the Ashkenazi establishment in its fanatic and toxic viewpoint. The introduction to the program will be presented by Carole Basri who has over the years been a consistent anti-Arab polemicist and an enthusiastic member of that part of the Arab Jewish community that seeks respect from the Ashkenazi leadership by acting as a reliable partner in its anti-Arab and Islamophobic agenda.
The history and culture of Arab Jews becomes important for the Ashkenazim only when it can be used as a wedge against the Muslim world and to support Israeli values. It is interesting once again to see how worked-up the Ashkenazim can become when something to do with Arab Jews can be used for their agenda.
I have discussed the Iraqi Jewish archive matter more extensively in the following SHU posts:
8. Veteran SHU readers know my great admiration for Diane Ravitch and the brilliant work she has done on behalf of American education.
This past week Bill Moyers held a very important discussion with Ms. Ravitch on the subject of Charter Schools and the way they are destroying American public schools:
http://billmoyers.com/episode/public-schools-for-sale/
I strongly encourage our readers to watch the full interview which begins from the ongoing controversy here in New York over Mayor De Blasio’s battle against the Charter School movement. In a horrifying presentation Ravitch details the incompetence and corruption of corporations who are literally trying to eliminate public education. The role of money and profit brings us yet again to see the toxic effect of Wall Street and its odious values on one of the most precious parts of our democratic system.
It is must-see TV.
Ravitch expands on her discussion with Moyers in the following post from The New York Review of Books:
9. The racist extremist Charles Murray is at it again:
Murray’s whining about America is rather interesting given the way that his Conservative ideology has been the dominant one in the culture since the age of the loathsome Ronald Reagan. Our political class has moved further and further to the Right while idiot pundits like Murray continue to lament the “loss” of traditional America, meaning the America of White racial privilege and elite rule.
The thing is that everything we are now seeing around us validates the idea that this elite White rule is as strong today as it ever was. Wall Street and corporations control society and the dominance of a debased infotainment culture has put African-Americans and other non-White minorities into a subservient position where they can be used and degraded. Poptrash and Hip-Hop are indeed the product of corporatism gone wild; an attack on basic ethical and intellectual values promulgated by the greed and venality of Murray’s cherished elites who continue to control the world with an iron fist.
But Murray is indeed correct that none of this White privilege has strengthened the country. What we have been seeing is the serial destruction of American culture and the economic engine which drives progress. CEOs that are being paid tens of millions of dollars while workers languish, hedge-fund managers and other Wall Street crooks skim whatever is left, and we are left with a coarsened culture adding up to an untrammeled “free-market” economy that was prized by the messiah Reagan and his merry deregulators.
The brand of Libertarianism, grounded in White privilege and racism, that pseudo-intellectual fakes like Murray and his allies like David Brooks have peddled since the 1980s have created a mess of gargantuan proportions.
From the looks of his latest article Murray – like Brooks – wants to whine about the very dysfunctional reality he has had a hand in creating, and counsel more of the same. We must further suppress any Liberal-Progressive ideas which might stem the perilous tide of the American Enterprise Institute and its institutional-political allies. We need more radical Libertarian ideas, not less.
It is delusional thinking at its very best!
10. For those able to follow the pretzel logic of it, this interview with RCA head Rabbi Steven Pruznansky is a fascinating example of the current Orthodox Jewish viewpoint:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/179142#.Uzqp96irpHY
The discussion shows us just how far to the Right things have shifted. The RCA was once seen as “Centrist” but has reacted to the challenge presented by Rabbi Avi Weiss and moved even further towards the Haredi hard-line. Rabbi Pruznansky is at great pains to define Modern Orthodoxy in as constricted terms as possible.
But what most interests me in this internecine battle between Ashkenazim is the way in which nomenclature plays a central role in the conflict. Terms like “Open” and “Modern” are defined, redefined, and contested. It is all about these “qualifying” terms and how they might serve to transform Orthodox Judaism. It is a tortuous PILPUL with very real ramifications for those living inside the Orthodox community.
Rabbi Pruznansky comes right out and rejects any nominal qualifications for Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy must in his view be Orthodox!
What is interesting to note here is that the term “Orthodox” is itself a qualifying term that was invented in reaction to “Reform,” yet another qualifying term that marks off one form of Judaism from another.
Sephardim, of course, have no qualifying terms that can be appended to the word “Judaism”; Judaism is just Judaism and all Jews are welcome to be a part of the community which was once – when there were still Sephardim! – led by enlightened rabbis under the rubric of Religious Humanism.
But in the Ashkenazi world there are qualifications based on these names; names that are highly contested – as we see clearly in the interview – and which close off different parts of the Jewish community from one other. It is a way to separate Jews and encourage factionalism; fomenting a bitter state of war between the competing Jewish groups. Beyond Zionism there is a deeper Jewish anxiety over which side to choose and how the official institutional leadership defines the rules of each faction.
In a related post, Professor David Berger affirms the Modern Orthodox shift to the Right and emphatically supports the value of Da’as Torah in the strictures of the community:
http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/opinion/determining-parameters-modern-orthodoxy-0
For those unfamiliar with David Berger’s academic work, he is very involved in Christian-Jewish polemical history and has done extensive study of the rabbis of Christian Spain. In particular, he has looked into the divergent views of Maimonides and Nahmanides:
http://www.zootorah.com/assets/media/MiraclesNahmanides.pdf
It is important to note here the relation between Ashkenazi authoritarianism, embodied in the Da’as Torah concept, and Sephardic Religious Humanism which draws from the thinking of Maimonides to establish a rationalistic and scientific Judaism as opposed to the magical-occult Kabbalah of the Ashkenazim; a position espoused most emphatically – as Berger shows – by Nahmanides and his school.
It is clear that there has been a strong pushback by members of the Modern Orthodox community such as Pruznansky and Berger against any changes to the status quo. More significantly, as the more Liberal elements are being turned back, the pressures coming from the Haredim are causing the Modern Orthodox leadership to indeed move further to the Right.
10. The New York Times thought it would be a good idea to have an Ashkenazi Jew write about the new Spanish initiative to grant citizenship to Sephardic Jews:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/opinion/repatriating-spains-jews.html?ref=opinion
This tone-deaf conversation presents Ilan Stavans – an Ashkenazi Jew with roots in Latin America who is often mistaken for being a Sephardic Jew – in the awkward position of having to refer to his “Sephardic friend” as a means to present his “authoritative” discussion, because we would expect nothing less from The New York Times.
Given that there are really no authentic Sephardim today, I suppose that it really makes no difference anyway:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/eisner/davidshasha/sjhvr4yozVU/idvBJCDl-IAJ
Why bother fighting for inclusion when there is no one left to include?
12. Here are two stories about the perpetual corruption of the Stock Market:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/01/stock-buybacks-and-margin-debt/
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/is-the-us-stock-market-rigged/
The first story shows us how corporations are inflating their stock prices by a process of buying their own stock in order to increase the price.
The second story discusses the new book by Michael Lewis which tells yet another cautionary tale about the venality of Wall Street. By using the most advance wiring technologies, high-speed traders have been gaming the market by buying up stocks at cheaper prices and forcing “slower” traders to pay more money for purchases that they are trying to make – but have been beaten to the punch by those with the faster connections.
None of this discusses the actual corporate malfeasance that has made investment a truly corrupt enterprise. No, all this tells us is that even in the midst of criminality there are gradations: one can be even more corrupt than his corrupt neighbor.
It is truly a race to the bottom; the bottom here being the place where one can get the most money.
13. In what is a rare moment of compare and contrast for SHU readers, there is a New York Times review of the same Kraftwerk concert that I wrote about this week:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/jErq2DhjllY
And I would be remiss if I did not make note of this gem:
As I write this comment there is no attribution of
authorship for the Miley Cyrus review, but whoever wrote it is one of the
greatest hacks of all time. It is a
bravura critical performance that looks very seriously at the peak
of Poptrash in today’s benighted
cultural universe. It seeks to provide
artistic legitimacy to what is pure garbage.
Well done!
With a more rational view of the Cyrus idiocy, Jim Farber of the New York Daily News puts things into perspective:
14. There has been a Haim Amsellem sighting:
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=16575
After some time out of the media spotlight, we are now seeing how Rabbi Amsellem has moved from the Haredi SHAS party to the Right Wing Likud party. The basic problem in all of this is that there is nothing in this landscape that speaks to Sephardic heritage or the problems Sephardim have faced in Israel.
I have discussed the matter in the following post:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/amsellem/davidshasha/-WPJ7BnQZ3o/cyS5RCMFOLYJ
Sadly it all seems to be about political maneuvering which entails currying favor with the Ashkenazim. The issue so prominently mentioned in these articles is about Conversion; an issue dear to the hearts of Religious Zionists and Modern Orthodoxy more generally. It is ultimately about making more Jews to settle the land and bring the messiah.
We are not seeing any real Sephardic leaders whose actual concerns are for Sephardic issues. It is all about access and power rather than principle.
David Shasha