Sephardic Heritage Update 989
David Shasha
Friends,
We begin this week’s newsletter with another article on Rabbi Joseph Dweck and his Sephardic self-hatred. Our friend Yoel Pimentel provides an excellent analysis of Dweck’s recent lecture series on the Sephardic heritage, which marks our tradition as unenlightened and deeply unaware of Modernity. Dweck has unfortunately been leading a devoted group of young men in what they call the “Sephardi Habura”; a group that leans towards his benighted acceptance of White Jewish Supremacy, replete with an utter ignorance of the conceptual meaning of the Sephardic literary heritage and the real challenge it presents that Ashkenazi racists.
An excellent example of that benighted Ashkenazi Orthodoxy is YU Rabbi Shalom Carmy. In his First Things article he promotes the Trumpist version of COVID “liberate” as he extols the violation of Social Distancing measures and lockdown protocols in the name of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein and Religious Freedom.
I recently became aware of Har Etzion student Cole Aronson, a prominent young up-and-comer in Tikvahworld. His article on Sephardi Habrura favorite Samuel Lebens’ recent book collecting scholarly essays on the new trend of Jewish Analytic Philosophy is a masterpiece of Ashkenazi demotion of the Maimonidean tradition and the values of Religious Humanism. I add to this White Jewish Supremacy exercise two of Aronson’s Yale Daily News articles promoting a strictly Straussian Neo-Con view of academic education. He will be a valuable addition to the Zalman Bernstein family, showing us how so many young Jews have been bitten by the reactionary Right Wing bug.
Ross Douthat is another young Right Wing religious zealot with Ivy League bona fides, who was also able to very quickly rise up the institutional ladder. Douthat has continued to have issues dealing with Trump and Trumpism, and his two articles on the Lysol Insurrection are filled with the ambiguity and deep confusion about the Republican Party and Movement Conservatism that has characterized his writing for the past four years. Rather than presenting things clearly and unambiguously, Douthat has consistently chosen equivocation in the PILPUL manner.
On the opposite side of the moral ledger is Timothy Snyder, whose article on the American “abyss” does not shy away from strong ethical positions. The article provides a superlative and incisive reading of the Insurrection that affirms our American values and refuses the New Fascism in a way that might teach Douthat a much-needed lesson.
Katherine Stewart looks at the vile Trump Insurrectionist Senator Josh Hawley, he of the iconic Alt-Right fist-bump, who has presented us with the iconic image of the Republican leadership as it supports sedition against our country. Hawley is yet another Ivy League elite who is now trudging through the muck and mire of the Trumpist excrement with treasonous glee.
I recently read Paul Mendes-Flohr’s excellent Yale Jewish Lives biography of Martin Buber – a figure who was prominently featured in my Yeshivah of Flatbush Jewish Philosophy curriculum (a course which, ironically, I failed!). While reading the book I was struck by the contrast between the obsequious honor paid by the Israeli government to Buber and its persecution of the lowly Sephardim. Buber’s antagonist Ben-Gurion consistently bowed his arrogant knee to the existentialist philosopher in a way that was rare for him. Here we get another bow of the knee, this one from Rabbi Marc Angel, whose love of White Jewish Supremacy seems to know no bounds.
We close with James Romm’s review of two new books on Masada and its place in Jewish and Roman History. The story of Masada is, of course, central to the Zionist mythology, but in studies by Steve Mason and Jodi Magness we see a very different picture of that history. The heroic version of the Masada martyrs is often a projection of the Zionist “New Jew” construct with its insidious subversion of the classical Jewish tradition as preserved in the Talmud. This dichotomy is relevant as we continue to process the Zionist ethnocentrism and its monolingual and monocultural view of Jewish identity.
David Shasha
Noble Savages: Rabbi Joseph Dweck’s Unenlightened View of the Jews of the Arab World
By: Yoel Pimentel
Clean Hands
By: Shalom Carmy
Review Essay: Objective Muddles and Persuasive Testimony
By: Cole S. Aronson
The Canon, What and Why
By: Cole Aronson
What Deserves Conserving?
By: Cole Aronson
How Trump Made the Fantasy Real
By: Ross Douthat
How the Republican Party Could Break
By: Ross Douthat
The American Abyss
By: Timothy Snyder
The Roots of Josh Hawley’s Rage
By: Katherine Stewart
Thoughts on the Teachings of Martin Buber
By: Rabbi Marc D. Angel
Review Essay: What Happened at Masada?
By: James Romm