ICYMI: From Humanism without Religion to Religion without Humanism: Neo-Con Jews from Commentary Magazine Lionel Trilling to Tikvah Fund Dara Horn
David Shasha
From Humanism without Religion to Religion without Humanism: Neo-Con Jews from Commentary Magazine Lionel Trilling to Tikvah Fund Dara Horn
A few months ago, while watching an MSNBC weekend program, whose host I cannot remember, I saw Eric Alterman promoting his new book We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel:
https://www.amazon.com/We-Are-Not-One-Americas/dp/046509631X
I was intrigued to learn that the book was a thorough review of American responses to Israel and Zionism, with special attention paid to the internal battles waged in the American Jewish community.
My most important takeaways from the book were Alterman’s impoverished knowledge of the Jewish tradition, and his abject erasure of Sephardic Jews in America.
The latter point is particularly galling, given that, after checking my e-mail address book, his CUNY e-mail address popped up; which means that at some point I did try to contact him in order to enlist him as a possible ally in the battle against White Jewish Supremacy. But as with his Nation colleague, and current MSNBC host, Chris Hayes, he never responded to my attempt to engage. And his book reflects this embrace of White Jewish Supremacy.
The former point, his lack of specifically Jewish knowledge, hampers his overall argument, as one of the primary through-lines in the book is a binary between Left Wing Reform Jews and Right Wing Orthodox Jews.
The binary leads him to make a big deal of the little-known American Council for Judaism, led by Reform Rabbi Elmer Berger, which was well-known in the first half of the 20th century as a major Anti-Zionist organization:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/american-council-for-judaism
Worse, the ACFJ was the go-to Jewish group for many in the State Department, in a period when its Anti-Semitism was most pronounced.
We Are Not One has garnered almost no public attention, though The Nation has posted ads for it in some of their daily e-mail newsletters.
It is a very interesting silence, given that Alterman inexplicably seeks to take a “fair and balanced” approach to what is a deeply divisive and contentious matter among American Jews. Reading the book, I felt that Alterman was always looking over his shoulder, trying to respond to Right Wing HASBARAH fanatics in a way that is most certainly guaranteed to alienate the Mondoweiss crowd.
Indeed, Alterman is at pains to present himself as a Liberal Zionist; a brand of Jew that is increasingly rare in a world of extremes.
I have commented on the 2020 Pew Research Report on Jewish Americans, which essentially argues that the 10-15% Right Wing minority of radical Zionists and Ultra-Orthodox Haredim, united under the current King BIBI and Settler umbrella, controls American Jewish institutions in a way that has elided the influence of Liberals like Alterman:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aumJU1VzaWupahVJvRlpp6iICo48MiETuFDFw0qtUfQ/edit
You can see how the process works in Jonathan Tobin’s evisceration of the book in Commentary magazine under the expected title “Altermaniacal Delusions”:
https://www.commentary.org/articles/jonathan-tobin/american-israel-alliance-eric-alterman/
As has become standard in Neo-Con Jewish circles, Tobin is not interested in finding common ground with Alterman, or with entertaining any Zionist options that do not comport with the current radical HASBARAH Settler reality.
It is something that Alterman should actually understand, given that his book tracks the progress of the Commentary magazine crowd, from its origins in Trotskyism in the 1930s CCNY hothouse to the obvious Norman “Making It” Podhoretz power grab in the Nixon era, leading to an absolute linkage during the Reagan presidency.
Alterman’s book had me do something that I have been reticent to do: examine the Neo-Con Commentary Jews, a movement that led right to The Tikvah Fund, in some detail.
Which brought me to Tikvah Benjamin Balint’s study Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right:
https://www.amazon.com/Running-Commentary-Contentious-Transformed-Neoconservative/dp/B0058M7LZM
For the first time, I was able to see the Podhoretz-Tikvah arc very clearly.
Central to the process in the Conversion Experience.
The New York Times has conveniently posted the introduction to Podhoretz’s 1999 tell-all book Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/p/podhoretz-ex.html?pagewanted=all
One of the figures that Balint highlights in Running Commentary is an early Commentary writer, Will Herberg:
https://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Judaism-Collected-Herberg-Masterworks/dp/0910129916
As the title of the essay collection From Marxism to Judaism indicates, Herberg was part of what Balint calls “The Family” (though I prefer the word MISHPOCHEH), which meant mandatory Trotskyite Communism and attendance at CCNY:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Herberg
As an important side note, the Herberg essay collection was published in Markus Weiner Publishing’s Masterworks of Jewish Writing, edited by our dear friend Jonathan Sarna.
Interestingly, Herberg came to Judaism through Right Wing Christianity, as we can see in his use of Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr, major figures in the Conservative religion movement in the early 20th century, and fixtures in the world of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review.
The essay collection moves from Communism to Anti-Semitism to a full-throated argument to turn America into a theocracy, much in the Alito Trumpscum SCOTUS manner.
It is not at all surprising that Buckley himself wrote the introduction to the book, as he saw Herberg as a religious radical Fellow Traveler:
https://www.mediamatters.org/national-review/national-reviews-ugly-civil-rights-history
The Media Matters article recounts National Review and its racist policies in the context of the Civil Right movement.
And Herberg is right there in the fray:
National Review's coverage of King and the movement certainly wasn't all rosy after the seminal March, either. ln an editorial for National Review published in September 1965, Dr. Will Herberg pinned blame for the Watts riots on Martin Luther King and his associates. According to Herberg, King and other civil rights leaders' promotion of civil disobedience -- though done with “the best intentions” -- had nonetheless taught “hundreds of thousands of Negroes...that it is perfectly all right to break the law and defy constitute authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance.”
After reading the Herberg book, I went to Nicholas Buccola’s excellent study of Buckley and James Baldwin’s Cambridge debate, The Fire is Upon Us:
https://www.amazon.com/Fire-upon-Us-Baldwin-William/dp/0691181543
Which made me aware of KKK macher Wilmoore Kendall, who remains a central figure in the Right Wing world, as can be seen in Tikvah Matthew Continetti’s 2022 National Review article, re-posted by the American Enterprise Institute in the usual WOKE Intersectionality:
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/willmoore-kendalls-resistance/
Where Herberg moved to the racist Right, we will note that one of Podhoretz’s “Ex-Friends” is a seminal figure in Commentary-world, Lionel Trilling, who took a somewhat different course.
Some years ago, I bought the New York Review of Books edition of Trilling’s 1950 best-seller The Liberal Imagination, and decided to finally read it in my Commentary magazine-Tikvah Fund-Neo-Con Jewish sequence:
https://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Imagination-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590172833
It is commonly noted that Podhoretz’s literary skills – whatever they might be! – come from his discipleship under Trilling:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/norman-podhoretz-making-it
Naturally, it is all about the Tikvah Fund Intersectionality, as Daniel Oppenheimer’s 2017 article on Podhoretz was published in Tablet magazine.
Here is how Oppenheimer marks the Trilling connection:
He fantasized the book might do for him something like what his mentor Lionel Trilling’s 1950 collection, The Liberal Imagination, had done for Trilling, which was to elevate his status to that of Major American Critic. Or, if not that, then at least maybe it would give off some sparks like Advertisements for Myself, the more recent, also rather messy, collection from his good friend Norman Mailer. When Doings and Undoings did neither, Podhoretz suffered.
But Podhoretz never achieved Trilling’s 1950s Cold War literary celebrity, as The Liberal Imagination took flight in the popular culture:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Liberal_Imagination
Interestingly, it was Podhoretz himself who decoded the not-very-Liberal message of the book:
A 21-year-old student at Columbia and writing for British journal Scrutiny, Norman Podhoretz, later to become a substantial figure in the "neo-conservative" movement that grew out of "The New York Intellectuals," writes that The Liberal Imagination is not really about liberalism at all (as Howe argues); it is "a collection of critical essays," whose purpose is to clear the air rather than definitively demonstrate. As criticism, Podhoretz suggests, it represents Trilling's belief that America's future depends on an integration of the European influence of British literary thinker Matthew Arnold’s criticism into "the American pattern," which Trilling attempts in the book.
In order to help me better understand Trilling’s role in the Neo-Con movement, I turned to Tikvah Tablet writer Adam Kirsch’s 2011 book Why Trilling Matters:
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Trilling-Matters/dp/0300187823
One of the most complicated things about reading Trilling is his “dialectic”: a term used by his followers that roughly translates to his talking out of both sides of his mouth. Not to speak of his tortured sentences, syntax and word choices, demanding cartwheels and mental gymnastics to decode.
I do wonder if all those who bought the book back then actually read it, or just kept it on their bookshelves as a cocktail party favor to show how smart they were!
The first thing that must be said regarding Trilling is that he not only relinquished his Jewish identity in toto, but, like one of his heroes T.S. Eliot, turned his back on American Literature and culture more generally.
We will recall the literary scholar F.O. Matthiessen’s 1941 study American Renaissance: Art and Expression In The Age of Emerson and Whitman:
https://www.amazon.com/American-Renaissance-Expression-Emerson-Whitman/dp/1162972343
As I read The Liberal Imagination’s staunch devotion to Anglophilia in a very Illiberal and elitist manner, I could not help but recall Matthiessen’s seminal book, which was one of the first attempts by an American critic to extol the virtues of this country’s literature in a way that sought to throw off the chains of British superiority.
Though Trilling does write about Twain and Fitzgerald, he remains wedded to the critical style of Matthew Arnold, as he extolled Henry James as an “English” rather than American writer, and focused on Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge.
And though the book does not do political advocacy in an explicit way, it has long been noted as a product of the Cold War, and as part of the Commentary MISHPOCHEH’s “Liberal” Anti-Communism that was embodied in Podhoretz’s predecessor Elliot Cohen:
Cohen once again brought together Trilling and Podhoretz:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.25290/prinunivlibrchro.63.1-2.0250
The Cold Warrior spirit can best be seen in Trilling’s essays on Kipling and on James’ lesser-known novel The Princess Casamassima:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Liberal_Imagination#%22The_Princess_Casamassima%22
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Liberal_Imagination#%22Kipling%22
Everyone knows Kipling’s tales of the “Great Game,” but fewer people are aware of James’ tale of anarchists and political rebels. It allows Trilling the chance to promote a very conservative political order in the face of the Iron Curtain.
Which has allowed some to connect the Columbia professor with Whittaker Chambers:
https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Turn-Whittaker-Anti-Communism-Historical/dp/0674032586
I was particularly struck by Trilling’s fraught connection to the New Agrarians, led by Allen Tale and John Crowe Ransom, a group that sought to promote Lost Cause Confederate sentiment in a variation of Heidegger’s soil-based primitivism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Agrarians
In my current series of readings on African-American history, I felt the need to read the 1930 New Agrarian anthology I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition:
https://www.amazon.com/Ill-Take-Stand-Tradition-Civilization/dp/0807103578
Amazingly, I actually found a Tikvah Fund connection, when Tablet magazine published an article on the Jewish poet Laura Riding:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/beyond-poetry-laura-riding
I commented on the New Agrarian KKK connection in the cover letter to SHU 1079:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/ZCkX-WKK3BM/m/orPtpeKEAAAJ
On the one hand, there is the New Agrarian racism, repeated in noted literary critic Edmund Wilson’s astoundingly shocking study of Civil War literature, Patriotic Gore:
https://www.amazon.com/Patriotic-Gore-Studies-Literature-American/dp/0393312569
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriotic_Gore
I learned about the notorious book from the great scholar and Frederick Douglass biographer David Blight:
He originally presented the argument on the Civil War literature in his excellent 2002 book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory:
https://www.amazon.com/Race-Reunion-Civil-American-Memory/dp/0674008197
But on the other hand, the Southern literary racists were pioneers in what has been called the New Criticism, which Trilling addresses in the following chapter from the book “The Sense of the Past”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Liberal_Imagination#%E2%80%9CThe_Sense_of_the_Past%E2%80%9D
For those of a certain age, the study of literature in American universities was dominated by the New Criticism, a method that unfortunately trickled down to the high school and elementary school level, which helped to stultify appreciation of literature, as it set the text in a cordon sanitaire, which sought to eliminate any extraneous considerations from the study of a text, eschewing history and the other sciences in academic analysis.
Trilling, as can be seen in the tricky use of his “dialectic,” espouses the hermetic “Art for Arts Sake” method, but does so in a complicated way, as he does refer to Freud and the Social Sciences in his criticism of texts.
But his use of Freud is not of the literary variety that we have become used to today, through the seminal work of the French psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Instance_of_the_Letter_in_the_Unconscious,_or_Reason_Since_Freud
In his seminal article “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” published in the collection Ecrits, Lacan does not treat Freud as a biological scientist, but as a textual interpreter, a narratologist.
This sense of Freud as a literary thinker was lucidly explained by my teacher Perry Meisel in his classic article “Freud’s Reflexive Realism”:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/778463
http://perrymeisel.blogspot.com/2010/11/freuds-reflexive-realism.html
And this, in turn, marks perhaps the most interesting part of Trilling’s complicated relationship to Judaism, which Adam Kirsch explores in his chapter “Isaac Babel and the Jews”:
Yet it is true that Trilling expressed strong resistance to being described as a Jewish writer. In 1944 he was asked to contribute to a symposium in the Contemporary Jewish Record, a magazine that was the predecessor to Commentary, on the subject of “American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews.” His short essay, republished in later collections as “Under Forty,” comprehensively declines any Jewish identification, in a way that seems strange and even suspect in our own confidently multicultural age.
As Kirsch cites Trilling’s own words:
I cannot discover anything in my professional intellectual life which I can specifically trace back to my Jewish birth and rearing. I do not think of myself as a ‘Jewish writer.’ I do not have it in mind to serve by my writing any Jewish purpose. I should resent it if a critic of my work discover in it either faults or virtues which might he called Jewish.
It is important to note here that it was my teacher Perry Meisel who introduced me to the work of Susan Handelman, whose seminal 1983 book The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory brought me to the study of Post-Modernism in a Jewish context:
https://www.amazon.com/Slayers-Moses-Emergence-Interpretation-Literature/dp/0873955773
Soon after reading Slayers, I fortuitously began to study with Rabbi Jose Faur, who was just finishing up writing his classic 1986 study Golden Doves with Silver Dots, which is sadly still out of print:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXQnNIeEJ3aGdSSjQ/view?ths=true
I have prepared a reading list on Judaism and Post-Modernism, which includes Robert Alter’s classic Neo-Con Tikvah-style attack on the process “Old Rabbis, New Critics”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NETtR-l9eFY7o0gOXsSK_tRYwkGqES_SD3bXjaGa2M8/edit
The Alter article was published in Martin Peretz’s New Republic, part of a larger move to the political and cultural Right:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXeFJDdkdrYmVVQUk/edit
In this Neo-Con Jewish context, I would assert that Trilling’s ahistoricism is tied to his Jewish self-hatred in a way that is not only Anti-Semitic, but which is antithetical to current trends in literary studies, which are awash in Rabbinic Midrash and other forms of innovative narratological methods in a Post-Modern vein.
Here I would point to the work of Trilling’s fellow literary scholar Erich Auerbach’s far more relevant study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature:
https://www.amazon.com/Mimesis-Representation-Reality-Literature-Fiftieth-Anniversary/dp/069111336X
The book was published in 1953, but was composed during Auerbach’s stay in Istanbul, where he lived in flight from the Nazis:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/auerbach-istanbul/
Mimesis is very much a book of memory and cultural reclamation in a truly heroic manner.
Which connects Auerbach to Jewish Neo-Con bete noir Edward Said:
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/said/said2.html
Said took from Auerbach the little-known figure Giambattista Vico, a humble professor of Rhetoric at the University of Naples in the 18th century:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16JAAqSfuMbMg5YWW9W9o8wL47oI7vYsq/view?ths=true
Vico has in the post-Trilling era become a household name in Literary Studies:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vico/
His essential book New Science is currently available in three different English translations:
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Penguin-Classics-Giambattista-Vico/dp/0140435697
https://www.amazon.com/New-Science-Giambattista-Vico-Third/dp/B001U8DVIY
https://www.amazon.com/New-Science-Giambattista-Vico/dp/0300191138
Vico is a notoriously difficult writer, and for those who want a way to understand his complexity, Donald Phillip Verene’s excellent book Vico’s Science of Imagination is a very helpful primer:
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Imagination-Donald-Phillip-Verene/dp/0801499720
I included Nancy du Bois’ article “Vico's Orations on Paideia and Humanitas” in SHU 67, which is also helpful for Vico beginners:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1001ayRjcF4UoU5jttQV_3IWWviO4bjqZq6VXUvfGvrw/edit
There is as well a connection to Jose Faur, who has written widely on Vico and Religious Humanism:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1btNE3Gj9mIL_drAIpiO77UMZNb9Pan2jyHHXUSsDkhk/edit
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXeTMtSjJWWEZfT1E/edit
I have expounded on the Vichian idea in my EDAH Journal article on the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ classic book The Dignity of Difference:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10PB65T0j5KCtYVuRDffdThuTUWdKksCt/view?ths=true
In the article I refer to Faur’s discussion of the classical historian Arnaldo Momigliano’s innovative thesis on Greek Monolingualism, as presented in his book Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization:
https://www.amazon.com/Alien-Wisdom-Hellenization-Arnaldo-Momigliano/dp/0521387612
The key to Vico’s teaching is cultural pluralism and rhetorical polyvalence in textual analysis.
Trilling’s elitist Monolingual Hellenism has been echoed in the work of Bari Weiss, who continues to promote an Anti-Judaic literary-political perspective:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FjPRUWhp0_opuHsAG7DbeUoENNvKIQdF/edit
Indeed, Tikvah Fund leaders Eric Cohen and Rabbi Mitchell Rocklin have created The Lobel Center in the Trilling spirit:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mPuTFFszLO7fbsK6MOu510pAY5YtJxQf/edit
Erich Auerbach also wrote extensively on Vico, and those articles are included in his posthumous collection Time, History, and Literature, which serves as a necessary supplement to Mimesis:
https://www.amazon.com/Time-History-Literature-Selected-Auerbach/dp/0691169071
The Vico influence appears most prominent in his essays “Odysseus’ Scar” and “Figura”:
http://sites.nd.edu/knownworld/files/2012/08/Auerbach_Scar.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odysseus%27_Scar
https://doaj.org/article/8880fa93427a48cc99ef72b19c6f1c87
As can be seen in these articles, Auerbach developed a sense of comparative cultural understanding which contrasted Hebraic and Hellenistic literature(s). Basing himself on Vichian philology, in contradistinction to Trilling’s deeply Anti-Hebraic critical stance, Auerbach opened the door to a different, Anti-Aryan, sense of history which can be seen in Faur’s Jewish Post-Modernism and Said’s Post-Colonial studies.
Said’s classic 1993 book Culture and Imperialism is arguably the most important, and the most influential, exposition of his Post-Colonial reading of Western Literature, and easily one of the most feted literary studies of the contemporary era:
https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Imperialism-Edward-W-Said/dp/0679750541
The contrast between Trilling and Said’s Post-Colonialism can best be seen in the two critics’ readings of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park:
https://contemporarythinkers.org/lionel-trilling/essay/mansfield-park/
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/10/03/specials/said-culture.html?_r=1
This point is important in understanding the racism which has animated the Commentary MISHPOCHEH and which now resides most prominently in The Tikvah Fund.
Indeed, it is noteworthy that Tikvah Jewish Review of Books founder and editor Abraham Socher has recently published a book called Liberal and Illiberal Arts: Essays (Mostly Jewish):
https://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Illiberal-Arts-Essays-Mostly/dp/1589881605
The title of the book is interesting in two different ways: First, it is an implicit echo of Trilling’s 1950 book, but it is also a kind of Trumpian Projection, which exposes the Illiberalism of The Tikvah Fund, which I have discussed in my article on Bret Jewish Genius Stephens and David Project Bernstein:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U5AbVQpUOkMZyhzuNMoLrSUPdO8Q7vTmsfQuLjKqqpY/edit
It is all about the DEATH SENTENCE culture war, which wrongly identifies the Left as guilty of the Cancel Culture epidemic.
As we saw with The David Project’s slanderous documentary “Columbia Unbecoming,” Cancel Culture is endemic to the Right Wing and the Neo-Con Jews:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GQ1T91xG72SCnuUwl7WQwGYGZk95Dg65zRphnSZxPWg/edit
Which is where Bari Weiss got her nihilistic start:
Socher worked as a professor at Oberlin College, who, like so many of the Neo-Con Jews in the multi-generational MISHPOCHEH, originally found his Jewish identity wanting, and, as we see in his book, took a number of different paths into the faith.
Unlike his progenitor Trilling, Socher is, as the subtitle of his book states, all in with the Jew. His essay collection includes paeans to the Schneersohn-Christ, Saul Bellow, and Cynthia Ozick, amidst a much larger White Jewish Supremacy argument.
He refers to the 2020 Pew Research Report in an essay on Tal Keinan’s idealistic view of the Jewish future, “Exit, Loyalty … Crowdsource?”:
https://www.ronslate.com/on-liberal-and-illiberal-arts-essays-mostly-jewish-by-abe-socher/
The collection opens with a fascinating, and deeply revealing, article on the classic 1948 movie “Key Largo,” which focuses on an anecdote related by the Humphrey Bogart character, recounting the famous Platonic myth of knowledge at birth, Anamnesis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamnesis_(philosophy)
It is a myth that many Ashkenazi rabbis like to recount in a Talmudic context, but that is not what I found interesting about Socher’s reference.
What I found interesting is the way that, in classic Trilling fashion, Socher completely ignores the “Key Largo” frame story, the arrest of two Indians named Osceola of the Seminole tribe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Largo_(film)#Plot
Of course, the movie is a gangster Noir, with Edward G. Robinson playing a fugitive hiding out at a South Florida hotel, waiting to score big with a deal for some counterfeit money, and flee the country to Cuba with Bogart helming the getaway boat.
But central to the story is the arrest of the Osceola brothers, an indicator of the racism of the local police who ignore the gangsters and focus on the Native Americans, leading to some tragic consequences.
The racist Socher, like Trilling, completely ignores in his book the existence of African-American and the “Peculiar Institution,” just as he ignores the Osceolas.
In Trilling’s case it was a particularly egregious omission, as his peers Irving Howe and the Liberals at Elliot Cohen’s Commentary magazine, were dealing with the emergence of African-American Literature on the heels of Wright, Baldwin, and Ellison:
http://www.plosin.com/beatbegins/archive/HoweDissent.htm
The Neo-Con Jews are notorious racists, deeply antagonistic to Multiculturalism and Racial Justice, as we recently saw in Tikvah Tablet’s attack on The 1619 Project and Nikole Hannah-Jones:
As, of course, as has long been the case with Edward Said in both Commentary and Tikvah Tablet:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xfZaFEfJ50Z92rf2Jl8Ijw8qVRoaLMP5/edit
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/edward-said-jews
Let it be said that the polemical Neo-Con centerpiece of Socher’s book is his Commentary magazine article recounting of a very lamentable situation at Oberlin involving African-American students and a local store named Gibson’s:
https://www.commentary.org/articles/abraham-socher/o-oberlin-my-oberlin/
If you are not familiar with the case, it actually has its own Wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson%27s_Bakery_v._Oberlin_College
It is clear that the Oberlin administration was completely wrong, the students assaulted the store clerk, and the police acted properly.
That said, like Trilling, Socher does not seem to be aware of African-American and other people of color. Black people are presented in the book as criminals and not producers of culture and knowledge.
Where Trilling is an elite Eurocentric racist, Socher too goes for White writers like Nabokov, DeLillo, and the sociologist Peter Berger (who, it should be noted, is beloved in the Neo-Con Jewish community for his work on religion) in a larger context which ignores African-American Segregation and the Negro Leagues in a discussion of steroids in Baseball with all its prized statistics.
It is all ultimately part of a larger White Jewish Supremacy framework.
In this sense, I was particularly intrigued by his essay “Take Your Son…” which is a reading of the Akedah, Binding of Isaac, that is deeply Anti-Maimonidean in its theology.
For those who might have missed it, here is my reading of the Akedah:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fgT1nVXk7uZmukIeezc8_UMvIIM2rVI2/edit
Socher, as is now common in White Supremacy Jewish Studies, is on the side of the Ashkenazi Anti-Rationalists and shows contempt for the classical Sephardic heritage, as he remains tied to Eastern Europe and antagonistic to the Haskalah and the Religious Humanism of Moses Mendelssohn.
It comes out in his convoluted engagement with the arch-heretic Solomon Maimon:
https://philpapers.org/rec/SOCTRE
https://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=8070&i=Introduction_pages
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691163857/the-autobiography-of-solomon-maimon
The discussion of Maimon is included in his essay “Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and the Stones of Sinai,” while the attack on Maimonides is included in the DeLillo essay dealing, tellingly, with the Resurrection of the Dead.
Which is never a good thing when it comes to the critics of Maimonides:
https://www.rabbimichaelsamuel.com/did-maimonides-believe-in-a-physical-resurrection-or-not/
Socher’s Illiberalism is trumped by our dear friend Dara Horn in her recent book People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present:
https://www.amazon.com/People-Love-Dead-Jews-Reports/dp/0393531562
I must say that I did my best to avoid reading the book, until I finally saw a physical copy at Book Culture in Manhattan, and gave in to my tayveh by flipping to the end, and saw prominent mention in the acknowledgements to my enemies the Tikvah ASF, Jason Guberman, and Eddie Ashkenazie.
We will get to them later.
While I was able to avoid Bari Weiss’ idiotic book on Anti-Semitism, more a branding exercise than an actual intellectual tome, Horn is a far more formidable intellectual; a highly skilled and mellifluous literary stylist who needs to be taken seriously.
More than anything else, it is all about her WHITE JEWISH RAGE, and that is putting it mildly because Dead Jews is the angriest book I have ever read.
It is a deeply troubling experience.
We have witnessed a sliver of that WHITE JEWISH RAGE in her slanderous attack on Ken Burns and his outstanding documentary “The U.S. and the Holocaust”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SMERk-ASM6s_8cidnXXBli7ECsNo8Baw/edit
Which acted as an inspiration to her BFF Rebbitzin Bengelsdorf, who went a step further by adding an attack on The 1619 Project:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/RtVNokk4Ork/m/R-LzYk5MEAAJ
It must first be said that the title of the book is not really about “People,” but a projection of Horn herself.
As I suffered through the WHITE JEWISH RAGE trauma, I was wondering where Horn would be without those very Dead Jews.
Her essays are collected from many Neo-Con Jewish publications from Commentary to Tikvah Tablet to Socher’s Jewish Review of Books, and speak in the Podhoretz language, but more specifically with the embittered Jewish nihilism of Ruth Wisse, Horn’s Harvard Yiddish mentor:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/a4xsIrYw3Hc/m/sS573TgYAgAJ
Behold the White Jewish Supremacy alive and well!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f58SPmvB68
Like the many Neo-Con Jews I have been examining in this article, Horn also has a complex Jewish identity story, which is lightly touched on in the essays, as she leads up to an unbelievable homage to the Ultra-Orthodox Daf Yomi in the final chapter of the book, “Dead American Jews, Part Three.”
By contrast, Trilling-meister Adam Kirsch also took on Daf Yomi for Tikvah Tablet, with some very different results:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14R5zEFD3mooKFkCDDLCP8E8gUeYOLeHX/edit
Though, like all the other Tikvah Fund machers, Kirsch is resolutely White Jewish Supremacist, as we learned from his presentation of Modern Jewish Literature which erased Sephardim:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vS4fB2t1W-Hab88bwP-MoQ0sCzdqZf0N/edit
Kirsch and Horn remain implacably Ashkenazi, as they see Jewish identity out of an exclusively White Jewish lens.
Dead Jews takes us to obscure locales like Harbin, a place with a very tragic Jewish history, with connections to the various authoritarian depredations of the Russians, Japanese, and Chinese in a Manchurian context:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbin
Let it be said, as with Socher’s Oberlin Gibson case, there is really no argument against the fact that Diaspora Jewish History is filled with pogroms and tragedy.
A good deal of this takes place in the Ashkenazi world, in the Pale of Settlement from the time of Chmilnitzky and the Cossacks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmelnytsky_Uprising
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/who-were-the-cossacks/
I have written an article “The Nightmare of Diaspora: Yoram Hazony and His Zionist Progenitors” that addresses the issue and its HASBARAH repercussions:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QiSKgPuEarpnSqRaJs6JdBTDWpWVzJkCG1XCCj37KEE/edit
I added to Trumpscum Hazony’s New Fascism with the following special newsletters:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mIGjVlWpqgYgp24AabfaDqm-8jngdKbn7ZqN99Jpnpo/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R-gc2MyjXbCYOB8HGjpUdQnFOunETAcmErWPHOSZ4y0/edit
Hazony has taught us the peril of Jews adopting European racist Nationalisms as a means to affirm their identity:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DxHkOp4KpryDXxhnRSzmWg3McaUV0CcsWPvAmV7uJpo/edit
It is a point that Horn herself has internalized, as her attack on Burns centered on the Jewish Fascist Vladimir Jabotinsky and the march to violence as a Jewish value.
Throughout the book Horn, whose knowledge of Jewish History and Literature is very much wanting, refers to the questionable historicity of the Egyptian Exodus, the Purim holiday, and the troubled Jewishness of Hanukkah as central pillars in her understanding of Judaism as examples of Genocide and Anti-Semitism.
I have discussed the problem of the purported Purim Genocide in my “Purim Notes”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19v1MeEIGJpdIzeKkDT8GMBYmMOBib74L/edit
In my “Hanukkah Notes” I laid out the complex issue of Hellenization in the battle between the Seleucids and Ptolemies in the context of the Greek Empire and its divisions:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VQPwvRTpXwrVjo4kcfvOcJ_84QfKmW34/edit
Horn is apparently not conversant with Jewish History in a granular way.
Dead Jews is in the end a book exclusively about Anti-Semitism, which she sees as an inexorable phenomenon.
Luckily, I have already responded to the generic Tikvah Fund model of Anti-Semitism in the following article:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GRObunZBnMD5tOWeQ7v6bQwEDiJo1a_jzUZZDmeZ8eE/edit
But Horn is well beyond anything we have ever heard from The Tikvah Fund.
Her WHITE JEWISH RAGE naturally deals with the Ashkenazi-centric tragedies in Russia and the Holocaust, but also, in good Tikvah fashion, contains meditations on Trump-era murders of American Jews – though never referring to Trump and the Alt-Right as a problem.
Indeed, the silence on Trump is not just deafening, it is a purposeful rhetorical strategy that compasses the larger point that Anti-Semitism is a perpetual element in world civilization; a point that would presumably preclude any sense of Multiculturalism, since the Jews are outside of world culture because everybody hates us and always will.
It is here that her lack of Jewish knowledge comes to the play a critical role in the poverty of her thesis.
For instance, when dealing with Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, a complicated text to be sure, she refers to Italian Jews and Anti-Semitism, but, as is de rigueur in the book, completely ignores Italian Jewish creativity and the larger context of Converso culture in response to Iberian Anti-Semitism.
One of the foremost experts on this context is the late Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi:
https://www.umass.edu/sephardimizrahi/past_issues/091227partone.html
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17KwgoMOz3vlGvmvl3F3BOW7Ugo26fsIT/edit
His classic books on Solomon ibn Verga, Isaac Cardoso, and Samuel Usque would help Horn to better understand the situation she is discussing:
https://www.amazon.com/Lisbon-Massacre-Royal-Shebet-Yehudah/dp/0822963760
https://www.amazon.com/Spanish-Court-Italian-Ghetto-Seventeenth-Century/dp/0295958243
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yosef_Hayim_Yerushalmi#Books
Only the Ibn Verga book is currently in print, which adds to the difficulty of maintaining this important history.
Indeed, Yerushalmi’s classic lecture “Exile and Expulsion in Jewish History,” posted by Tikvah Mosaic (!), is a brilliant analysis of the subject of European Judaism in a way that denies the nihilistic fatalism that is Horn’s trademark:
http://jewishideasdaily.com/docLib/20091209_Yerushalmi.pdf
We can then go a step further and look at the Meldola rabbinic dynasty, which links the Italian Jews to England and the larger Atlantic Jewish world:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G5DUuux6kzaxQoUyMoSHw3aiAgTSx07hFM0QgNbW684/edit
Hakham Raphael Meldola connects the Italian Sephardim to Moses Mendelssohn in a way that should make us consider the role of Conversos like Fernando de Rojas in the process:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10kbuFKU6NJzWY--bff4Lr7ClUJk6Du050gbcTtZsFS0/edit
The Conversos remain an important link not only to the Haskalah, but to Shakespearean England, as Rojas’ classic tragicomedy “Celestina” anticipates the future anguish of Shylock:
https://newplayexchange.org/plays/10926/conversos-venice
Like her progenitor Trilling dealing with his chosen subjects, Horn is obsessed with the question of authorial biography, asking whether Shakespeare was an Anti-Semite.
It is a question that many have asked over the centuries, and it is unlikely that anyone will ever have a definitive answer.
All we have is the play and Shylock.
The details of the play are simple, if hard to process in a moral sense: A Jewish moneylender uses a strange pledge in case of default, requiring a pound of flesh as payment in lieu of the cash. The moneylender’s daughter falls in love with her father’s debtor, and leaves the Jewish fold, eventually leading to Shylock’s demise.
You can read the story in different ways in terms of who is the hero and who is the villain. None of it is explicitly defined by Shakespeare, in spite of the fact that, as Horn correctly points out, he used an Italian source for the play:
https://www.rsc.org.uk/the-merchant-of-venice/about-the-play/dates-and-sources
It was common for the Bard to use such sources:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Shakespeare/Shakespeares-sources
As in the case of Hamlet:
https://www.medievalists.net/2017/11/original-hamlet-story-prince-amleth/
Of course, contrary to Horn, a source is not the same as Shakespeare’s text.
As there is no way to establish whether Shakespeare was an Anti-Semite, it is incumbent on us to actually read his play, whether as Jews or as Gentiles.
While I am sure there are many Christians who take Shylock as a villain, it is possible for Jews to read him as a vanquished hero whose anger is washed away in a society of cruel Anti-Semites and Jewish self-haters.
But more than Horn’s discussion of Shylock and her son (a child whose anger and intractability, as his mother describes him, sounds a lot like Horn herself), we have for Sephardim the penultimate chapter in Dead Jews, “Dead Jews in the Desert.”
Because all Sephardim live in the Desert!
Sephardim like the Egyptian writer Edmond Jabes, whose massive Book of Questions could teach Horn something about Jewish reading and hermeneutics:
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Questions-Yukel-Return-Vol/dp/0819562475
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Questions-Ya%C3%ABl-Elya-Aely/dp/0819562483
His book of interviews with Marcel Cohen, From the Desert to the Book, provides a brilliant iteration of contemporary critical thought, very much in his Egyptian Jewish context:
https://www.amazon.com/DESERT-BOOK-Edmond-Jabes/dp/0882680617
As with Socher, Horn is not much on Sephardim, seeing Jews and Judaism as an exclusively Ashkenazi preserve.
When she gets to the Arab Jews, she turns to the Tikvah ASF’s Jason Guberman, who I have discussed in my article on The Tikvah Fund’s White Jewish Supremacy and the erasure of Sephardic representation:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r37pPX50xTTxxfuzDO69vJPDsK4rsQ8t/edit
As I have written many times, Guberman began with the notorious Daniel Pipes:
https://www.meforum.org/1971/the-middle-east-quarterly-announces-winners
And with Tikvah:
https://diarna.org/news/diarna-curator-chosen-for-fellowship/
Sadly, I have had a number of personal run-ins with the racist Guberman, who is not only intent on eliminating the classical Sephardic heritage as understood by Maria Rosa Menocal and Jose Faur, but is committed to White Jewish Supremacy in the form of his group DIARNA:
DIARNA is a HASBARAH-conducive research group, which aims to create an active database of Jewish property in the Arab-Muslim world.
Which is part of the larger HASBARAH program embodied in the Arab Jewish Refugee movement, led by Ashkenazi-run groups like Justice for Jews from Arab Countries and JIMENA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_for_Jews_from_Arab_Countries
https://www.jimena.org/about-jimena/
Once again, for those who still might not have read it, here is Yehouda Shenhav’s classic article “Spineless Bookkeeping: The Use of Mizrahi Jews as Pawns against Palestinian Refugees”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oPTvRhqbBnxzvVPmur-VIVRhI4uPt2oe/edit
Which leads us back to The David Project and its HASBARAH documentary “The Forgotten Refugees”:
https://www.jimena.org/resources/forgotten-refugees/
Horn’s deployment of Guberman and DIARNA is connected to the erasure of the classical Sephardic heritage and the implementation of a documentary-museum material “culture” which has long been something the Israeli government has wanted as a wedge against Palestinian claims for financial restitution.
More than this, Horn’s DIARNA information is my former student Eddie Ashkenazie, whose knowledge of the Sephardic heritage is quite limited, as he has sadly bought into the YU/ASF White Jewish Supremacy nexus, which is certainly amenable to a White Jewish racist like Horn, who maintains the mantra of “Jews lived in the Arab world before the Muslim conquests.”
Indeed, a lot of people lived in the Arab world before the Muslims!
Not just Jews.
But that is not relevant to Horn, who has difficulty turning the Middle East into the Pale of Settlement, though she does try hard with mention of the FARHUD.
For those who have still not read it, here is the late Nissim Rejwan’s eyewitness testimony on the tragic event, an event caused less by Arab-Muslim Anti-Semitism and more by British Imperial malfeasance and public disorder:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/152mzNuyZzR5UWpohF6vmWWheMnoQefygNHp4-8CK-_8/edit
As Horn knows nothing about Sephardic history, she might also benefit from my special newsletter in tribute to Rejwan:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HhJQ1jwvbrGvU3t0Ts6CiufNdjyldWTN0At0vPWS9js/edit
She might also want to read my tribute to the late Maria Rosa Menocal, a true friend of the Sephardic Jews:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e9Bi7Y12B3li38_PHne_JThpC67yhH1kJrSK48XXAX0/edit
The aptly-named Brooklyn SY Ashkenazie recounts the stories and web materials that DIARNA has preserved, none of it connected to the intellectual-religious culture of the Sephardim.
But, as Horn insists, People Love Dead Jews!
When it comes to Sephardim, the deader the better – as the Tikvah ASF has so well taught us:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jkws0yY4GqDLXTeGt04TGOjB2GFlpuFlO7kkwpRlmNE/edit
Indeed, Horn never asks why an Ashkenazi like Guberman is running a putatively Sephardic organization, as is the case with JIMENA and Congregation Shearith Israel.
But she never asks that question because the leaders of these groups are all Tikvah machers, amenable to the White Jewish Supremacy and residual racism of Eurocentrism, which ensure to keep Sephardi activists out.
And in that way, you can never get to Faur, Said, Vico, and Religious Humanism.
Which teaches us how Trilling was Humanism without Religion, as Horn is Religion without Humanism.
People Love Dead Jews is a perverse repository of Pogrom-Porn whose WHITE JEWISH RAGE is relentless.
It contains a perverse encounter with Anne Frank, which has Horn writing an imaginary obituary for her, as if the young woman was never murdered by the Nazis. Frank’s history remains a through-line in the book as she becomes a target for Holocaust memory polemics that Horn deploys against a world that she believes only wants to see Dead Jews and not living ones.
As in Tikvahworld, it is a benighted worldview resists intercultural harmony, as it resists the cosmopolitan identity integral to the Sephardic heritage.
Horn’s unhinged anger is consonant with a New Fascism which is mired in grievance and despondence, as she sees no place for the Jews in the world. It is a very dark place where light and enlightenment can never grow and live. It is a world of dead bodies, blood, and anguish. It is relentless in its Anti-Humanism.
In this way we square the circle of the Neo-Con Jews; Jews whose relationship to Torah Judaism is tendentious at best, and which seeks out a narcissistic elitism that marks a Jewish Separatism, whether it is Trilling’s racist Anglophilia, Socher’s Multicultural blindness, or Horn’s Conradian Heart of Darkness.
It is all of a single piece, from Commentary magazine to The Tikvah Fund and its many offshoots, which connects to Trumpworld and its roots in Kendall Willmoore’s National Review White Christian Supremacy.
David Shasha
From SHU 1097, April 5, 2023