לשים לב

Jews: stop trying to be universal. It's not going to work.

Also: I want to raise Jewish children, not necessarily Israelis.

Foucault and Jews

Foucault wrote a pretty baller essay about all the factors that culminate in producing authors, and, more specifically, how we think about/view them. He mentions Freud and Marx directly, and expounds on how they are more than just authors, but ideas, philosophies, whole encompassing dialectics. This can be seen in the way we deem things "Freudian" or "Marxist." Strangely enough, Marx said he wasn't a Marxist, and when we call Lacan "Freudian" it diminishes the former's impact. Freudian is recognized as a word by spell check; Lacan's formal name, however, is not.

Shakespeare "embodies" (or represents) a similar position - a precarious one, though, as he writes fiction. Shakespeare differs, too: I wouldn't say he has his own dialectic and theories. But his impact is tremendous and he is an icon, an institution, maybe.

Our professor challenged us to name writers as important: I would posit Kafka and maybe Proust.

Observation: all these men are Jews.

Analysis: it is not important that they are Jews per se, but it is important that it's not important; they are products of assimilation. They ALL epitomize The West: more than being Jewish, they are European.

Of course, these men were all conscious of their Jewishness, and it played a (albeit minor) role in their lives. Marx (or Engels, it doesn't matter) wrote "On The Jewish Question"; Freud said something about being proud of his Jewishness yet highly critical of religion (like Marx/Engels); Kafka had his famous quote about Yiddish; Proust - well...I don't know much about Proust. I know he experienced anti-Semitism, but that might be due to his upper class position. He probably had something to say about that whole Dreyfus debacle.

I am reading an relevant Ozick (omg, LOVE her) essay right now....

Thoughts on the Thesis

I've done this several times now: stay up late for no real reason just to work on my thesis. You might say, "the reason is to work on your thesis." Yes and no. I haven't been staying up late to work on my thesis because I have something due tomorrow. No; the reason (one does exist) is my love for what I am doing. I have retained enjoyment of my chosen subject and, hopefully, I will always retain this love. Jouissance! Can I make this emotional appeal to graduate schools? "Hey, I don't know three languages, but I fucking love this shit and have devoted considerable time to it already! Just please let me in your PhD program so I don't have to beg my parents for money/take out loans!"

But does past dedication correlate to future dedication? Grad schools think so, right????

Ode to Shostakovich

Violins like fiddles -
I listen to your symphonies
and think only of the ghetto.

DMITRI

suffocated by Stalin,
secret Jew.
Babel, alone, translated
stories into the mammeloshn.
you, likewise alone,
composed and thought of Sinai.

Richard Dawkins is kind of a jerk

Why on earth would he feel the need to create on alternative to the ten commandments? Ok, I guess I understand his annoyance with the constant references to an omniscient deity. But, honestly, are the rest of them that inconsequential that new ones are required?

Here the the original ones:

• I am the Lord your God
• You shall have no other gods before me
• You shall not make for yourself an idol
• You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God
• Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
• Honor your father and mother
• You shall not murder
• You shall not commit adultery
• You shall not steal
• You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor
• You shall not covet your neighbor's wife
• You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor

I feel like Dawkin's need to create a new set of commandments is based on his ignorance of the other 603 of them and a desire to condense everything into a nice little package. Pious people are well aware that the Ten Commandments are all nice and good, and the most important of ones, but also recognize that following as many as possible is the path to righteousness. Certainly the Ten Commandments get redundant and annoying; the first four are all the same. But I feel similarly about Dawkins's.

Here are his humanistic ones:

• Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you
• In all things, strive to cause no harm
• Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.
• Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
• Live life with a sense of joy and wonder
• Always seek to be learning something new
• Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.
• Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
• Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
• Question everything

These are great guidelines and I appreciate his sentiment. Some of them sound like a call to veganism, though, which is interesting because that is how some interpret kosher law. And obviously the appeal to skepticism is not shared in the original ten, but a penchant for questioning is a very important facet of Jewish tradition. "Live life with a sense of joy and wonder" sounds oddly religious, and probably isn't followed by most secularists, myself included, because they tend to be cynical atheists with a propensity for nihilism.

Don't get me wrong, I think Dawkins is a great dude who is fighting the good fight against religious extremists. But I have to call him out; I think he would benefit from a better understanding of Halachah, or maybe even the Five Pillars of Islam, which I wish I knew more about myself. What Dawkins's commandments lack, though, and I believe Jewish law has, is this commandment from the Pagan list:

• Work together for the benefit of all humankind.

(I also think Dawkins would benefit from observing and resting on the Sabbath [which I am ironically not doing] instead of publishing obsolete tracts.)

Busy as fuuuuuck

Yom Kippur offered no respite from work, although it's not really supposed to.

I would also love to do a Freudian/Oedipal interpretation of The Jazz Singer. Shit's crazy: Jakie and his mom basically have sex via music (just like in Thomas Mann!). When this is going on, the father intrudes upon the scene. An interesting shot follows as the camera remains focused on the father's face. What is he thinking? Keeping in mind that the father doesn't know it's his son playing the piano with his wife, the father could very well see this as adulterous flirtation. Jakie and his mother also kiss on the mouth, which may be seen as familial/platonic in the social context of the sixties, but nowadays: that shit's sexual.

I also like the scene where Jakie is confronted during rehearsal about the synagogue needing a cantor on Yom Kippur. Jackie beats his breast while claiming that show-business is a religion of its own (on Yom Kippur, during selichot, it is proper to beat one's breast).

There are also multiple instances of both Jakie and his mother looking at pictures of one another and being reminded of how much they love each other. Creepy.

The movie fucking rules.

Bernard Lewis is a bamf.

"Imperialism, Sexism and racism are words of Western coinage, not because the West invented these evils, which are alas universal, but because the West recognized and named and condemned them as evils and struggled mightily - and not entirely in vain - to weaken their hold and to help their victims. If, to borrow a phrase, Western culture does indeed "go," imperialism, sexism and racism will not got with it. More likely casualties will be the freedom to denounce them and the effort to end them" (Cultures in Conflict 79).