From the ARCHIVE: Jazz Against Democracy: Albert Murray Goes the Full Tikvah Fund via the Racist American Sephardi Federation
David Shasha
Jazz Against Democracy: Albert Murray Goes the Full Tikvah Fund via the Racist American Sephardi Federation
I have already posted the repugnant article from Tikvah ASF White Jewish Supremacist Aryeh Tepper, which pathetically tries its Ashkenazi racist best to turn the great African-American writer Albert Murray into a disciple of the vile Leo Strauss, one of the primary founders of American Neo-Conservatism:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/68vNhH2FakU/m/H6XQelnGAgAJ
Given the sorry state of the Sephardim at present, it is natural that the ASF would hire an Ashkenazi racist like Tepper, whose sole published work is, it goes without saying, on the master prevaricator Strauss himself:
https://www.sunypress.edu/p-5744-progressive-minds-conservative-.aspx
It is indeed all part of the sick, sad world of the “Idiot Sephardim”: members of an ethno-cultural group that has lost all pride in itself, and has given over its socio-political interests to those who wish to see their history and heritage degraded and ultimately erased in the face of the superior European Jews:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fUx-B5XHPIrr7b_7xS4ZpmiEmvo_qBy0pKqOAtmJ5WI/edit?usp=sharing
Self-Hatred is thus crucial to this debasement of the Sephardic heritage, with its deep ties to an Arab Civilization that has become the enemy since the advent of Zionism in the late 19th century, and intensifying with the proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948.
In his seminal 2006 book The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity, the scholar Yehouda Shenhav has given us a much-needed critical understanding of this depressing phenomenon:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VUAJJo6CRjp_C2xRVI_kCdOG2yy0RtCG/view?ths=true
In my article “A Jewish Voice Left Silent,” I have provided an alternative understanding of the matter based on a traditional understanding of the Sephardic heritage:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-jewish-voice-left-silen_b_487586
The Andalusian tradition of Convivencia, the cultural symbiosis that Arabized the Jews of Spain, was presented in the many scholarly works and popular writings of the late Yale Professor Maria Rosa Menocal, whose work has unfortunately become a point of contention in a world controlled by Ashkenazi Zionism and its rejection of the native culture of the Islamic world and its Jewish citizens.
I have paid tribute to Menocal in the following newsletter:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e9Bi7Y12B3li38_PHne_JThpC67yhH1kJrSK48XXAX0/edit
Her classic 2002 book, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, provided a smoothly readable popular introduction to this great civilization:
https://www.amazon.com/Ornament-World-Christians-Tolerance-Medieval/dp/0316168718
Sadly, the Ashkenazi Jews have refused to accept the legitimacy of this thesis, and it is quite telling that the book – or others like it – have not been made available in Modern Hebrew to Israeli readers, who remain ineluctably hostile to Arab culture; seeing it as inferior to that of Europe.
I have learned from painful personal experience just how much the historical idea of Convivencia has been rejected by the Jewish world.
It is a prejudice that has unfortunately become second nature to Mizrahi Jews in Israel, the vast majority of whom remain implacably hostile to their former neighbors.
The journalist Rachel Shabi has presented the problem in her excellent 2009 book We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Jews from Arab Lands:
https://www.amazon.com/We-Look-Like-Enemy-Israels/dp/B005DIAL0I
That hostility reflects the standard form of understanding in the institutional Jewish world, which has had very practical ramifications for the Sephardic heritage, preventing it from acting as a peaceful bridge between Jews and Muslims in the region.
As I have noted countless times, the Arab-hating, Islamophobic ASF helped to spearhead the ouster of former Center for Jewish History head David Myers because of his dovish views on Palestine:
https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/09/05/new-ceo-of-center-for-jewish-history-holds-radical-viewpoints/
The rabid anti-Myers crusade led by Ronn Torossian was noted by Rob Eshman:
https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/rob_eshman/224250/david-myers-debacle/
Trumpscum Jew Torossian is a real piece of Right Wing Zionist work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronn_Torossian#Political_career
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/04/29/pro-trump-pr-guy-mueller-probe-218112/
As Eshman stated about the Myers debacle:
Some supporters of the American Sephardi Federation, one of the five institutions that make up the CJH, got sucked into the one-sided “news” and sided with Torossian. A couple of far-right Israeli Knesset members demanded Myers’ head — because, you know, Israel has no more pressing problems than a Zionist historian taking over an American Jewish museum.
Current ASF Executive Director Jason Guberman was hired largely because of his group DIARNA, which supports the Israeli government’s attempt to push back on Palestinian claims for material compensation, as it has very conveniently created an on-line database of lost and abandoned Jewish properties in the Arab world:
https://www.meforum.org/61793/guberman-on-digitally-preserving-jewish-sites
The aggressive go-getter Guberman is a longtime Daniel Pipes ally, as far back as 2008, when he was one of the winners of his Middle East Quarterly’s student writing contest, for an article on, what else, Islamists!
https://www.meforum.org/1971/the-middle-east-quarterly-announces-winners
For those who may not know him, Pipes is a young Jewish racist’s best friend:
https://www.mpac.org/programs/anti-terrorism-campaign/the-truth-about-daniel-pipes.php
Such a fine HASBARAH pedigree is sure to get you noticed, and is an excellent career stepping-stone in the White Jewish Supremacy institutional world, as Guberman has deftly proven.
Naturally, the DIARNA initiative was also noted by Tikvah Mosaic:
https://diarna.org/press/saving-the-remnants-of-jewish-life-in-the-arab-world/
The aforementioned Yehouda Shenhav has written definitively on the nefarious way in which Israel has deployed the material compensation issue as a wedge against Palestinian claims in his 2012 article “Spineless Bookkeeping: The Use of Mizrahi Jews as Pawns Against Palestinian Refugees”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/hHSlpH_1_Hk/m/NmoqvDC4BQcJ
For those who might still not be aware of the bizarreness of a pair of Right Wing Ashkenazi reactionaries running a putatively Sephardic organization, the following articles will get you up to speed:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14cKispiXs6t14GfQlUw764iNnX6XZTdc9YzMU8LhwHc/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jkws0yY4GqDLXTeGt04TGOjB2GFlpuFlO7kkwpRlmNE/edit
To be honest, given the contempt of Tepper and Guberman for the moral values of Sephardic heritage and their embodiment in the SHU, I was hoping that posting Tepper’s outrageously offensive article would be the end of this unpleasant chapter of the ongoing saga.
Sadly, I was quite mistaken.
So, here we go again!
And yet again, we must play the game of Woke Neo-Con Ashkenazi Intersectionality connect-the-dots, as I have done so many times already:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/R7gha6V9fhk/m/ejiGa7PQBAAJ
I just posted an item on the Neo-Con love affair between Tikvah Bari Weiss and Black Neo-Con Glenn Loury:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/wl0lG1tSMh8
The post makes mention of Thomas Chatterton Williams, who has recently appeared in the SHU as a loyal supporter of Thomas Sowell and The Rufo Institute’s Jason Riley:
https://lawliberty.org/encountering-thomas-sowell/
To make the Tikvah Black Neo-Con Intersectionality that much clearer, we have learned that Chatterton Williams will be participating in an ASF-sponsored event that appears to be related to the aforementioned Tepper article:
http://event.omniamerican.org/
Here is the event description:
The American Sephardi Federation, the Jazz Leadership Project, and the Combat Antisemitism Movement are joining forces to fight Racism and Antisemitism with an online event featuring artists, thinkers, and musicians who will offer perspectives on a shared "Omni-American” future. The term “Omni-American” is borrowed from the writings of Albert Murray, the great 20th century Black American thinker and writer who, together with his good friend and celebrated novelist, Ralph Ellison, extolled America’s pluralistic and “incontestably mulatto” culture. By robustly critiquing racial essentialism and strongly emphasizing the power of culture instead of race, Murray and Ellison's writings strike at the root of ideologies that foster division, manipulation, and hatred, and ultimately develop into Antisemitism and Racism.
The idea is to co-opt both Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison for the Neo-Con project, as if they were Thomas Sowell and Leo Strauss.
Naturally, another of the event’s sponsoring organizations is Free Black Thought:
In case you have not heard of it, Free Black Thought is yet another in a line of Black Neo-Con groups that rigorously promotes the reactionary views of Sowell and his disciples:
https://freeblackthought.substack.com/
Their Substack articles provide the usual attacks on CRT:
https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/why-did-critical-race-theory-emerge
BLM:
https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/blackness-with-a-capital-b-or-can
Black Victimhood:
https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/the-economy-of-victimhood
Black Intellectuals:
https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/black-intellectuals-are-black-americas
Wokeness:
https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/livestream-today-2pm-et-woke-or-still
You get the Bari Weiss idea.
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/K9u8VAR6aoY/m/NPCrvBywBAAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/h7d0hzRmHUI/m/JL5CH5VUAQAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/SyCaBbGRk68/m/QzGTz38qEgAJ
Everybody Hates the Jews!
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/PxOQ3eF7PU0/m/rS59jM2MAQAJ
The Omni-Americans event fortuitously brings together the Tikvah ASF with its radical Right Wing Tikvah partner, the misleadingly-named Jewish Institute for Liberal Values:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/4FRto3Kgn80/m/L16QgfDxBQAJ
It was founded by former David Project head David Bernstein:
We will recall that The David Project was the first Jewish institutional home of Bari Weiss, and produced the infamous documentary “The Forgotten Refugees,” a favorite of the Arab-hating Right Wing Jews:
The documentary is closely associated with JIMENA, yet another Ashkenazi-led “Sephardic” organization:
https://www.jimena.org/resources/forgotten-refugees/
JIMENA was at the forefront of the relentless attacks on the recently-passed California Ethnic Studies Curriculum:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SBkVBFplCWMowuOs6V_0aJ1ZDh6JQd8vtwz22A_xdvA/edit
JILV is connected to the larger project of the SAPIR Journal, led by the infamous Bret Stephens:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/9sNvRGoAK4E/m/so3wPrbFAwAJ
Stephens remains a key cog in the Neo-Con Jewish wheel, as he continues to spread the Trump Hunter Biden Gospel:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/A3dO29MNF_U
And for those who might have missed it, Stephens is a firm proponent of the racist idea of White Jewish Genius:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/ED84JNpK-ms/m/Kt2lSNeMAQAJ
As was the case with Andrew Goldberg’s lamentable documentary “Viral: Antisemitism in Four Mutations,” it is now clear that the White Jewish Supremacists of The Tikvah Fund now control the discourse on Anti-Semitism:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/HFDTXwZ-5ME/m/7BMVytyMAQAJ
The Omni-Americans event features ASF perennials like Self-Hater Rabbi Daniel Bouskila, with his Washington Heights HASHKOFEH:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/t8H5Ql09xnw/m/BbICyUdWCAAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/LL_Xt1-i9GU/m/CXSPA4wSBgAJ
It also features Chloe Valdary, an African-American in good standing at Commentary magazine:
https://www.commentary.org/author/chloe-simone-valdary/
And JILV SAPIR macher Pamela Paresky:
https://sapirjournal.org/authors/pamela-paresky/
And Tikvah Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver:
https://tikvahfund.org/about/staff/jonathan-silver/
Underlying the whole thing is the troubled ghost of Stanley Crouch, who I paid tribute to when he passed last year:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/W17G8DwLjS0/m/FlcTc0dGAQAJ
When I wrote the brief note my aim was to avoid Crouch’s twisted politics, and help people better understand the Ellison-Murray tradition and its socio-cultural artistic richness.
That tradition, as I noted, has been buttressed by the classic 1967 book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual by Harold Cruse, whose 2005 New York Review of Books edition contains an introduction written by Crouch himself.
I have always been inspired by Cruse’s attack on Jewish Paternalism, as I continue to fight the Ashkenazim who are erasing us.
Crisis is a brilliant work that explicitly criticizes the very Ashkenazi racism suffusing the Omni-Americans event:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1986/3/1/crisis-after-cruse-pbtbhe-publication-of/
Even more curious, given the political constellation that continues to surround Crouch, is the fact that he also wrote the forward to a 2002 collection of Cruse’s writings which was edited by the Black Leftist radical Jelani Cobb:
https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Harold-Cruse-Reader/dp/0312293968
Cobb’s New Yorker archive is a veritable Straussian nightmare!
https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/jelani-cobb
But, as I said, the issue of Crouch’s politics continues to remain vexing.
In my tribute I mentioned Crouch and Black Separatism:
Crouch was attacking Black Separatism many years before Ta-Nehisi Coates was cashing Ike Perlmutter’s “Black Panther” checks.
But I was also careful to make note of the Jewish Neo-Con connection, which seems to persist in the Omni-Americans event:
The Baltimore Sun article contains a troubling statement of praise from Cynthia Ozick, which makes things that much more complicated, as we continue to try and figure out what American civilization is, and where oppression fits into the larger scheme of things.
Crouch’s life and career presents us with the many complexities and complications of the Race issue and how ideology and partisan politics can subvert the values of Democracy.
It is not that Crouch stood aside when it came to that twisted political situation, but that at his best he was able to provide an explanation for what America was and how it so deeply reflected the universal human condition. While I often disagreed with his more reactionary assessments of people and trends, his voice remains valuable for those of us who continue to value cultural excellence and demand its rightful place in our society.
Given the bitterly conflicted nature of our society at the present moment, it is hard to know what Crouch’s legacy will be, and who will ally themselves to his anger and frustration over the Poptrash Idiocracy.
In SHU 974 I included Ishmael Reed’s vitriolic takedown of Crouch and his mannered Neo-Con bullying:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/sio3y8wPZHg/m/_ChGlLFAAgAJ
Here is the link to that no-holds-barred Counterpunch article:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/16/the-tragedy-of-stanley-crouch/
And just to make things that much more complicated, Reed himself has also been co-opted by the Tikvah world:
https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/ishmael-reed
That would perversely connect him to Crouch, as both men are favorites of Whore of Trump Alana Newhouse:
https://www.tabletmag.com/tags/stanley-crouch
As I have repeatedly said, The Tikvah Fund has taken its place as arguably the most important Jewish institution in America.
As we have seen, its tentacles connect many other organizations, as it seeks to usurp the discourse on Jewish Identity and Anti-Semitism in toto:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y8UrV67wrZUghBRZimf_5PeQTkQbzXsufntJtD6Y1EM/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tcZ47eu45_GyLGHWIQYZiWtnTBZAgDXZVnixE0O3ZR0/edit
It is deeply saddening to see how it has consumed the Sephardic community, as it controls not only the ASF, but, through the vile reactionary Jewish primitivist and Trumpracist Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, the formerly-Sephardic Congregation Shearith Israel as well:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Gm1W7pJHRYI/m/LArV53KjBQAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/2ZAUqDiAT40/m/v4cbBilPAQAJ
SI is the oldest Jewish congregation in America; once a proud bastion of Sephardic Jewish Humanism, but now home to the reactionary Lysol values of The Tikvah Fund:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/2ZAUqDiAT40/m/v4cbBilPAQAJ
For those still unfamiliar with Soloveichik’s oeuvre here is a taste:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sUvnfXMeduh00CKAuDD30NiRwbD-5Q147YrMHbGs7Q0/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_fs8wonYLfhONdKPKTgFt_aoi6GPoJ2uhDFcWOfKuTk/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vkNZusv09KazmHUp3BNcBGIe9TEZEMcKsZXfbBFMm4Q/edit
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ytYVvsu-He-LACFKWcSsYGguR5uX33u9/view?ths=true
It is indeed deeply unfortunate to see how Jazz, that great American democratic art form, is being used in a duplicitous manner by the Tikvah Jews to undermine our very democratic values; as they continue to promote racism and White Jewish Supremacy.
I have written a paean to Jazz legend John Coltrane, which marks the way in which one of the greatest exponents of that musical tradition expressed the values of Religious Humanism that are so central to the Sephardic heritage:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-Zl7deMMVDX3JFMCZ1QUbmYfrMBpxzoXkqOWAyGbCi4/edit
Here is a passage from that article that situates Coltrane’s timeless 1965 masterpiece “A Love Supreme” in a way that encapsulates my own views on art and its impact on our religious values:
“A Love Supreme” is a relatively short work, clocking in at a mere 33 minutes.
But, oh, what transpires in that brief period of time!
The work is structured in four movements with the haunting, mantra-like spoken refrain of the title acting as a leitmotif of what is essentially a cycle of religious hymns filtered through a Jazz vocabulary which is hot-wired by the fierce tonality of Coltrane’s saxophone and his band’s expert playing.
It is an indelible musical experience that stands proudly with artistic masterpieces like Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights,” Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane,” Sergei Eisenstein’s “The Battleship Potemkin,” George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel,” Marcel Carné’s “Children of Paradise,” Vittorio De Sica’s “The Bicycle Thief,” Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, as one of the most significant cultural achievements of the 20th century.
These seminal works are rooted in our shared humanity in the most profound ways; reflecting the complex creativity and depth of everyday experience in Art and in Life. They all share a restless thirst for what it means to be human and how we can best face the challenges of existence.
“A Love Supreme” is a recording that speaks to the innermost part of the human condition, as Coltrane dug into the deepest recesses of his being and produced an extraordinary instrumental discourse of love, illumination, spirituality, and knowledge, expertly delivered with a powerful creativity; a meaningful mediation on the very core of what Religious Humanism is all about.
Indeed, as we have seen in the Tikvah ASF and its partner Neo-Con organizations, Religious Humanism is profoundly antithetical to their Straussian ways, inasmuch as Strauss himself attacked Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, and Hermann Cohen for being non-authentic Jews who adulterated the Shtetl with their Goyische Humanist ways:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/
Strauss’ seminal work “Persecution and the Art of Writing” makes the bold claim that Maimonides hid his true views, which were antithetical to Torah Judaism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_and_the_Art_of_Writing
The elitist nihilism of the Straussians is rooted in a deeply Anti-Liberal and Anti-Democratic view of political philosophy and religion that rejects the spirit of America, and by extension, the noble values of Jazz.
It is a world of lies rather than truth.
I do wonder if the great musician and educator Wynton Marsalis, another participant in the Omni-Americans event, is aware of how he is contributing to the erasure of Andalusian Convivencia and the destruction of the classical Sephardic heritage by those Tikvah reactionaries, led by Tepper and Guberman’s debased Ashkenazi contempt for us.
Shame on him and all those participating in the event.
David Shasha
From SHU 1025, November 17, 2021