Weekly Items of Note (5/3)
David Shasha
The Haredim Thank You!
On Friday I posted my article on the universal Jewish condemnation of New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/i8ZF-UUVpUg
A short time after send that out, I received this from JTA:
It appears that the Haredim, famous for not reading the newspapers, did find time to get their HIZZUK from all their fellow Jews, who apparently approve of their defiance of government stay-at-home orders and social distancing rules.
They appear to be so appreciative of groups like JFREJ for working so hard to exonerate them and attack De Blasio, that they went right out and did it again!
As we have learned from Lysol Trump, when you let a criminal get away with it, they will do it again.
It is called “recidivism.”
Yaron Oren-Pines Thanks You!
In a second report from JTA we learn of Coronavirus fraud and profiteering in an Israeli Diaspora key:
You know it is funny – I am often attacked mercilessly for my criticism of Israel in defense of the Sephardim, and one thing that I sometimes do is ask my critics whether or not they would do business with an Israeli.
Not only do all of them say no without exception, I sometimes get horror stories from those same HASBARAH mavens relating their own personal experiences with those Israeli crooks.
It is the Sabra way, as we see in the sad tale of Yaron Oren-Pines.
It is certainly not that all Israelis are dishonest, but there has been a long history of defying Jewish moral values, embodied in what the Zionists demanded as Jewish “normalcy”; something that would allow Jews to be thieves and prostitutes:
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/20/weekinreview/a-grown-up-democracy-including-the-sleaze.html
Just like the Goyim!
I like the way Anatoly Sharansky put it:
Natan Sharansky recalled last week that during the Watergate era, Soviet authorities would hold up the American scandal to Jews seeking emigration as an example of how terrible the West really was. ''We said we only dream of coming to a time when we can have our own Watergate,'' Mr. Sharansky said with a broad grin.
''It was Ben-Gurion or someone else who said our dream is to be a normal people, to have our own thieves and our own prostitutes,'' he continued, now breaking into a laugh.
''Well, the dream has come true.''
It was in fact Chaim Nachman Bialik, the great modern Hebrew poet, who said, ''We will be a normal state when we have the first Hebrew prostitute, the first Hebrew thief and the first Hebrew policeman.'' But however the quote is misattributed, it is now Mr. Sharansky's way of acknowledging that the Jewish homeland he struggled so hard to reach is in a real political mess.
The Sharansky quote came in response to some Netanyahu scandal back in 1997, but it applies equally to the case of the phantom respirators.
I am now wondering whether or not the “De Blasio is an Anti-Semite” crowd will be writing an open letter on behalf of Mr. Oren-Pines.
Maybe we are just being Anti-Semitic in bringing it up!
Congregation Shearith Israel: The Rimonim
I received an e-mail from someone named Louis Solomon on Thursday, which included the following nugget:
Finally, in what we hope will grow into a "good news" column in our weekly communications, we wanted to bring to our Congregants' attention the beautiful e-blurb that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts just published on one set of our Myer Myers Torah finials, or rimonim. The Congregation supported our long efforts to protect and preserve these rimonim. The Congregation deserves the joy of seeing them, safely on temporary loan, at the MFA. https://collections.mfa.org/objects/548181/pair-of-torah-finials?ctx=69dfca5d-b511-4be9-bbba-88497852345a&idx=6
Mr. Solomon does not care that Shearith Israel is dead to the Sephardic heritage; that it is being run by a Tikvah Fund Trumpist neo-pagan who hates the Sephardic heritage.
He is promoting rimonim!
This encapsulates the sad reality of SI at this moment in time.
White Jewish Supremacy at Jewish Currents
With all that is going on we should not forget how Sephardim continue to be erased – by both the Left Wing and Right Wing Jews.
This Shabbat reading list is from the neo-Marxist Jewish Currents:
Mari Cohen (staff writer): Several months ago, I heard Damon Williams, co-host of a podcast that interviews artists and activists in the Chicago area, mention that Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, by James and Grace Lee Boggs, was one of his foundational texts for movement work. I’m finally finishing it up now. The authors, longtime Detroit-based leftist activists, identify the Marxist principles at work in 20th-century political revolutions from Russia to Vietnam and offer lessons for how they might be applied by future organizers, including—in the part I haven’t gotten to yet!—in a potential leftist revolution in the United States. Published in 1974, the book itself also serves as an interesting historical document capturing US leftist thought in the post-1968 moment.
Nathan Goldman (associate editor): Long before all of my socializing took the form of video calls, I had one standing video hangout: an occasional reading group with two college friends. Last week, we met to discuss the conclusion of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (in Martin Greenberg’s translation). The play’s first part—which includes all the famous stuff: Mephistopheles getting Faust to sign away his soul, etc.—is operatic yet elegant. The second part is something else entirely, a kaleidoscopic cacophony of plotlines and genres; before you know it, Faust is having a kid with Helen of Troy. Harold Bloom called it “the most outrageous poem in the western canon,” which I think is Harold-Bloom-speak for “a fucking trip.” Once I relented to the ride, it was a bewildering blast.
Miriam Saperstein (New Voices fellow): My housemate’s therapist recommended she read The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin, and my housemate told me about it months ago as we were walking to class one evening. I’m finally listening to the audiobook. A fantasy epic with intense world-building, The Fifth Season is part of a three-volume series that dives deep into earthquakes, intergenerational trauma, and what it means to get free.
David Klion (newsletter editor): Kim Phillips-Fein’s Fear City came out three years ago but feels especially timely in light of Covid-19. It’s a vivid, accessible history of New York City’s infamous 1975 budget crisis. To fend off a right-wing primary challenge from Ronald Reagan, President Gerald Ford refused to bail out New York on ideological grounds. In the absence of federal assistance, Wall Street banks effectively seized control of the city’s governance and implemented austerity, gutting public services that had once been the envy of the world and transforming America’s greatest city into the violent dystopia captured in films like Taxi Driver. Forty-five years later, a pandemic is exposing the threadbare safety net neoliberalism has left us with, and nowhere more dramatically than in New York.
Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): These last two weeks, for me, have been all about Fiona Apple. Her fifth album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters—her first in eight years—is a snarling, theatrical affair. Seemingly recorded at home with primitive methods of percussion and her dogs barking in the background, and replete with withering indictments of evil, destructive men, it seems made for this moment. I am a devoted fan: I first saw Apple perform in 1997 when I was 12 (her first album Tidal had not yet come out; she was opening for Counting Crows). Every successive album has felt so personal, and has hit my life with such force, that it feels almost strange to share the experience with so many others. All to say, it's a tall order for any review to capture all of what I might want to say, and yet this perfect 10 Pitchfork review by Jenn Pelly more than manages.
I was told that the publication’s editor-in-chief is actually Sephardic, though one would not know it from what she presents in her posts and recommendations.
TV Note: “The Last Dance”: Worms and Sex Harassers
In the previous WION I discussed the ESPN documentary “The Last Dance,” which is purportedly about the Chicago Bulls dynasty, but is really a Michael Jordan infomercial.
In the second of the five weekly installments, Jordan’s arrogance and cruelty – and basketball genius – got some important company:
This week we finally got to see the beginning of Jordan’s epic championship run, after years of frustration, but we also got to see the championship Detroit Pistons – easily the most repugnant sports team in history:
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/761050-detroit-pistons-the-five-baddest-boys-of-the-bad-boys-era
Central to that obnoxious – and very violent – collective was Dennis Rodman, who would later be on the Bulls:
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/27570283/the-complicated-evolution-dennis-rodman
Rodman, better known to basketball fans as the “Worm,” is a White racist’s dream player: completely incoherent, violent, barely able to string words into a legible sentence.
You may have seen him in North Korea with his BFF:
https://abcnews.go.com/International/slideshow/dennis-rodman-visits-kim-jong-18632908
Once the target of Bulls fans’ ire, his move to Chicago shows the hypocrisy of rich and pampered sports fans.
Particularly good was a brief shot of Rodman signing autographs for some mainly very young white kids, and being asked whether he wanted to visit Nashville:
https://kentuckysportsradio.com/basketball-2/ksr-roundtable-the-last-dance-episodes-three-and-four/
It was a perfect moment that encapsulated the absurdity of professional sports today: rich White racists cheering on formerly-impoverished African-Americans who are objectified like pets.
And then of course there is Isiah Thomas, the famous sex harasser:
https://deadspin.com/listen-to-sexual-harasser-isiah-thomas-lie-about-his-se-1702567139
The Pistons were inarguably a great team, but their skills were often trumped by their bullying and cruelty. As when they finally got a well-deserved beat-down from Jordan, and they left the court early so that they would not have to shake the hands of the victors:
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/158201-the-day-the-bad-boys-walked-out
Indeed, “The Last Dance,” unwittingly to be sure, presents the race problem in pro sports as we continue to deal with socio-economic disparity in the Trumpdeath era.
David Shasha