Monday, March 18, 2024

What do we do about anti-Zionist Jews?



On the one hand, I'm going to be mean and merciless. On the other, I need to try to be compassionate, and by the end of this post I'll arrive at some sort of compassion. The inevitable end result is that I'll sound condescending. The best I can say is that I mean to, but this post is not just an admonishment to them, it's an admonishment to the millions of Jews who failed to accept them before it was too late.

This post deals with a particular form of anti-Zionism: not the religious idiots, who deserve their own vitriol, but the secular type that would sacrifice Jewish lives in the name of justice, and would deliberately facilitate the rise of the most fundamentalist Islamic factions in the name of peace. It deals with the particular form of anti-Zionism that refuses to admit that they give cover to millions of totalitarians. It deals with the particular form of anti-Zionism that admonishes us to listen to every marginalized voice except for the millions who shout 'We are going to kill you.'

To the Jews who think Israel has gone too far, to the Jews who think Israel deserves to exist and defend itself but its strategy is unwise, even to the Jews who believe that Israel has committed thousands of unquestionable war crimes, this is not directed at you. There are probably arguments to be had, but they are just arguments, they are not bad blood. Even to the Jews who think Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, my bad blood to them will take years to forgive, but this is not directed at them.

In the leadup to every left-wing dictatorship that killed millions, there were naive progressive voices so disgusted with authoritarian conservatism that they made common cause with anyone who superficially seemed to agree with them. These progressives so believed in justice that they made common cause with the most militant totalitarians. These totalitarians had the will to violent acts that would disgust every progressive long before everybody else. The totalitarian will to power easily overcame their would be allies - and progressive idealists were always among the first to die. Thousands would follow them to the mass graves, often hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions. 

So it would be all too easy for the rest of us to excommunicate anti-Zionists in our minds: to say that an anti-Zionist Jew is as Jewish as a Jew for Jesus. The truth is that we don't have the right to make that claim any more than ultra-orthodox sects have to excommunicate the non-Orthodox. If some form of Nazis kill again, be they Hamas or Charlottesville torchers, they kill the revisionist Jews along with the originals.

It's not enough to call anti-Zionist Jews wrong, even willfully wrong. They're indefensible. They are token minorities who give cover to hundreds of millions who want to murder us all; and they know it. They performatively disguise their egotism in selflessness, and their holier than thou sanctimony is as sickening as any Jew who covers for Trump, probably moreso. They deserve our vitriol, and in the company of other Jews they deserve to feel attacked and shamed; but eighty years ago they were much more common, and their lack of support for Israel just might have been the reason that killed them in the millions for their Jewish extraction right next to the European Zionists who couldn't make it over. Anti-Zionist Jews are morons, but they don't deserve to die. They were all Jewish enough for Hitler, and they willfully ignore that they're Jewish enough for Hamas. It doesn't matter. A bad Jew is still a Jew. They die as Jews, they bleed as Jews, and if there is a god, they will have to justify themselves as Jews.

So long as they cling to this delusion, they deserve neither our trust nor our respect, but they do deserve our sympathy. There is no argument they can make that sounds like they came to their beliefs with their heads. But if they didn't with the head, they came to their beliefs with their hearts, and came to their conclusions as the near-inevitable result of limitations within the Jewish mainstream. So many of them became what they became because their lots are particularly difficult. Whether the issue is social, physical, financial, romantic, isolative, psychological or mere unlucky circumstance, the grew up feeling alienated, fell in with dangerous elements, and lost their way as so many billions do. The problem is not them, the problem is us, and somewhere along the way, probably many times, we failed them. We rejected them, we didn't reach out, we made fun of them, we humiliated them, we beat them up, we abused them or we looked the other way while others did it, we made them feel different long before they came to any conclusion, and we made them into true believers who'd sooner sacrifice us all than stop repressing what their brains are screaming at them.

Eric Hoffer, as so often, says it best: “The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement.”

They would, of course, argue that it is Zionism that is the self-renouncing mass movement, where millions of Jews go to lose their heads. We can't pretend they don't have a point. Zionism was founded precisely because Judaism fit in no place around the world for millennia. Even now, there are so many byways in the Zionist labyrinth where you can lose your way: religious, military tactics, settlements, weaponry, the willful accession to authoritarian rule. If they wanted to argue that the majority of Zionists have lost their way, there is a good chance they're absolutely right. By giving unquestioning support to the contemporary Israel in all its flaws, worldwide Jewry has sinned. 

But anti-Zionists sin much more gravely. There is no world where sacrificing Jewish security in the name of international solidarity is morally acceptable. There is no world in which it's morally acceptable to make Jews fall so that other peoples rise, if they rise at all as the result of our fall. There may be a next world, but the notion that a just world comes to ours by laying down our arms is no more likely than the existence of heaven, and what other country, what bloodier country, is demanded to disband itself in the name of world peace? 

Whether they realize it, Judaism is pragmatism; it's looking realities straight in the face and negotiating ways around them. This is the Rabbinic tradition, this is the lesson of Moses appeasing Yahweh simultaneously to appeasing the Israelites, this is the lesson of Joseph and Abraham negotiating their survival among the Egyptians, this is the lesson of Jacob dealing with Laban. It is only through pragmatic compromises to morality that you can pursue the moral purpose and destiny you find in Isaiah, Sinai, Amos and Abraham's covenant.

There are millions of apragmatic Jews in every era: zealots, messianists, millenarians, communists, even neoconservatives, and their refusal to stare reality in the face gets Jews killed. They do not believe in moral ambiguity, they only see their way, they see every argument against them as an argument for them. In pursuing their beliefs to their logical conclusion they never build the world they seek, and by the time they're done can leave a trail of dead bodies in the millions.

Again, antizionists will say that it is we who do not see a way but our own. There is no limit to bad faith arguments that flip truth upside down, but that is precisely the point. There is no world where you don't deal with bad faith, there is no world where you don't deal with people so convinced they are right that that they can interpret everything through the filter of what they believe. Zionism takes in the liberal as well as the illiberal, but there is no liberality in anti-Zionism, only a naive national pacifism that is exploited so easily that no person could use their head to embrace it.
Antizionism is our punishment for our limitations, it is the dark side of Judaism that disguises itself as light and mistakes bitter for sweet.

So it's only by transcending our limitations that we overcome it. Anti-Zionism is not a rational belief, and like all irrational beliefs, they change not by convincing them, but by embracing them. No matter what they deserve, it's only by accepting anti-Zionists on a personal level and not judging them their mistakes that we persuade them of the single most obvious Jewish truth.

I don't have the room in my heart for them right now. I'm not that good, I'm not that tolerant, I'm too angry right now, too hurt, too scared. But I hope that one day I have room in my heart for them again just as I hope they have room in their hearts for mine, a fact made doubly difficult because I frankly doubt many of them have any room for me.

But as anti-Zionists correctly tell us, the only way to transcend violence is through forgiving the unforgiveable. I frankly doubt this leap can ever be made, but I do agree with them that the cycle of violence is only broken by embracing those who would perpetrate the worst on you in the hope that they embrace you back.

But if there ever is to be an end to hatred, this is what's required. The difference between us is that I see no evidence it's possible and to bet on it is bad faith lunacy. Nevertheless, the human spirit is built on the dreams like this. The world is what it is, but to dream of a world where a Jewish state is unnecessary is only human. If ever we can convince a few of them to let their dreams remain dreams, let them dream.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

That's History


The only way I'm going to get through this incarnation of what Israel's call the 'Matzav' (the 'situation') is by disconnecting from it. Not stop reading, but stop connecting emotionally. At the very beginning of this, I wrote here that the only way we were going to get through this is by steeling ourselves. Not steel in the sense of eliminating compassion, but steel in the sense of facing cold hard fact: history is the eternity of subverted expectations. We're supposed to be heartbroken, and it's only when we're too heartbroken to expect triumph that triumphs are made. It's the experience of defeat following victory following defeat following victory. It's the eternal wheel of fate. Everything that rises falls, everything that falls rises. Jews are no exception, if anything we are the ultimate proof.
If Israel doesn't complete the decimation of Hamas, if Israel does not rescue the hostages, if Israel exchanges hostages for Palestinian prisoners, there will be more attacks on Israel, and Hanas will do everything they can to make them deadlier. Steel yourself.
If Israel wins, Netanyahu can take the credit and may win back a narrow voting majority of the Israeli public, thereby staying as Prime Minister, possibly for life, no matter how hated by the rest of Israelis. Steel yourself.
The longer this goes on, the more millions of innocent Jews will be held responsible in unpredictable ways for the mere crime of supporting Israel, even a peaceful Israel. Steel yourself.
The longer this goes on, the more Gazans are likely to die of famine and disease in far greater numbers than have died so far. The longer this goes on, the more likely Hezbollah is likely to bomb saturate the Israeli north to the point that Israel will have to launch another ground invasion in Southern Lebanon. Steel yourself.
If a Palestinian state is recognized worldwide without Hamas stripped from power, if Hamas gets a full measure foreign aide, Israel/Palestine could experience warfare on a scale only seen in the modern Middle East by Syria and 80s Iraq/Iran. Steel yourself.
The longer this goes on, the more tempted goyisher friends will be to dissociate from Jews for the crime of supporting Israel. Steel yourself.
The longer this goes on, the more tempted American left wingers will be not to vote for Biden, British left wingers not to vote for Starmer, German left wingers not to vote for Schultz, and French left wingers not to vote for Macron should he be in a runoff with Le Pen. Many leftists in all four countries reason that since their supposed liberal leaders advocate for what they construe as genocide, things can't get any worse. They would thereby cause the fall of any liberal bulwark against right wing authoritarianism, and perhaps the fall of democracy in all these major world powers. Thereby endangering the very Muslim communities they think they're protecting. Steel yourself.
The longer this goes on, the more Israel will necessarily become the ally of any Western power that opts for reactionary anti-democracy leadership. Steel yourself.
The longer this goes on, the more willfully the world will overlook the crimes of Hamas and twenty other Middle Eastern dictatorships. Steel yourself.
The longer this goes on, the more Israel becomes a wedge issue between friendships, with potential for explosive fights that turn friends into enemies. Steel yourself.
The longer this goes on, the more tempted other Shia powers are to create other theaters of war: not just Hezbollah in Lebanon but Iran, Yemen, Syria, spurring a war that could inflame the entire region, and perhaps spread elsewhere. Steel yourself.
This is history. History is not just one fucking thing after another, it's the dispelling of each era's illusions. Every solution is temporary. Civilizations have life cycles just like people do, so do policy solutions. Everything eventually lives out its use until its physiognomy comes undone. This is what we read about. You just face the unpleasant truths and realize that you are part of processes so much bigger than you are. Eventually we all are just nodes of data compiled in a book, where our life stories are distilled to historical trends, waves, forces, beliefs, where the reader views our way of life with ironic distance.
Nearly all of us feel the ground under our feet shifting right now, the expectations of our era are coming undone just like the expectations of previous eras. These tectonic shifts are more lethal than any earthquake ever recorded, but just like earthquakes, they always happen, and then they stop, we pick up the pieces, we rebuild, we latch onto new beliefs, and we take care as best we can to provide for a future that doesn't experience our turbulence.
But eventually, the turbulence comes back, and eventually, that turbulence will stop again just as ours will.
Sometimes, you just have to accept that you're on a ride bigger than anything you do, and all you can do is your best to make yourself into metal that doesn't melt in even the hottest climates.

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Why Are Jews So Sensitive About Israel?



So why are we so hypersensitive about all things Israel? Is it birth-to-death conditioning as so many progressives would have it? Is it as so many antizionists have it, a fascist connection to the Mogen David that represses any thought that contravenes our tribal mentality? Is it, as so many Jews would have it, the extreme frustration at gentile hypocrisy? Or is it as so many Jewish fundamentalists have it, that the world is crawling with antisemites?

It's none of the above.

It's far more basic than any of those, simultaneously more primal and more real.

There is a baseline fear, often an unconscious one, but I maintain it exists in every Jew you've ever met, even somewhere in Jewish antizionists. The fear is this:

If you get rid of our state, you get rid of us.

There is that nameless dread in every Jewish soul, repressed until we hear you talk about Israel, that all this security and prosperity is as paper thin as the citizenship documents which were always taken away from us. Other groups worry about prosperity and denied opportunities, Jews worry that it all will be taken away. 

Here's something I wrote a while back: 

"So many gentile lives are constrained from too few choices, most Jews are stuck by too many. So many gentiles worry that they'll never get what they need, Jews worry that everything they need will disappear tomorrow. So many gentiles feel the chip of humiliation, and dream that with more things: titles, privileges, pride, their humiliations will cease. Jews are history's ultimate proof that everything you think is helpful is worthless: from materials to titles to privileges to pride to ESPECIALLY MONEY. There is no such thing as a life protected from humiliation - the whole point of how to live a good life is that we endured our humiliations with faith, honor, responsibility, righteousness, kindness and community; that we show seven good faces to a world that's wanted Jews dead for 2000 years, will want us dead many times yet again; and many people who seem friendly to us now may stand by as we get annihilated.
No Jew seems oppressed until every Jew you know disappears overnight. No amount of money protects us, no amount of prestige stops us from being blamed, no amount of power cannot be stripped at a moment's notice. It is the eternal Jewish lot to rise as high as any outsider can possibly rise in a foreign society, only to fall the very moment when things go wrong and the true insiders need meat to throw to the populace."  

Look at every immigrant in the world whose state threw them out, then look at us. Other modern peoples get displaced for generations, or a hundred years, but our whole lifespan as a people is one long displacement and this is the one period since Christ himself that has been the exception. If we don't have Israel, we have no country at all, just memories of countries that threw us out whenever we became marginally inconvenient. We exist lifelong with stories of ancestors exiled from every corner of the world. That fate was what 2000 years of Jews worked so hard to avoid with no avail. It's the fate in which our guts tell us we will partake again. Even if the Palestinian refugee status lasts for the rest of my lifetime, it's still temporary compared to the Jewish stories I and fifteen million other Jews have heard our whole lives. If we get displaced again, it's not just us or even our grandchildren who might be refugees, it might be all our descendants for all coming time until we get another brief blip of security 2000 years from now.

And that's only if we live. When we didn't have a state of our own, we were subject to all the same persecution as any other minority, only to then encounter complete, systemic, total extermination. Not the extermination of a substantial portion of us, not our extermination over the course of 400 years, but near complete extermination over two or three years, spanning our population over an entire continent. And not once, but repeatedly. In the Crusades and the mass expulsions of the Middle Ages, in the conquest of Judea by Rome, in the aftermath of the Black Plague, in the Chmielnicki massacre in Ukraine - that state which now means so much to liberal Jews, in exterminations thousands of years ago that seem ever so distant until the moment their stories reappear in our consciousness as horrifyingly present, and of course... that thing that happened to my grandparents.

So many leftists and intersectionalists and anticolonialists find all things Israel distasteful, but they would read the above and see a complete affirmation of their worldview. "That's exactly why we fight for the dispossessed!", they would answer. "That's why we fight against nationalism! That's why we fight against genocide! That's why we fight for the rights of victims!"

Why should we believe you? What makes your movement so special when every other revolution to save the world has backfired?

No one reaps the whirlwind ideological movements create the way Jews do. 

Let me repeat that. 

No one reaps the whirlwind ideological movements create the way Jews do. 

The proof will be for another day. 

Why I'm Feeling Black Dog

 Leaving aside any personal concerns, of which like everybody I have my share, probably a lot more, I feel like a man without company.

I'm trying to be a dispartial arbiter of what's going on so people could get context, but I've slowed down because I almost can't do it. What's going on with my former friends on the left is so infamously disgusting. What's gone on on the right is obviously disgusting and has been for decades, but on the left I saw it coming and warned them for two decades. I thought because some were my friends a plurality of them might be exceptions, but it made no difference to well over 50% of the people I know. I knew it at the time, yet I hoped against hope. There's the ancient antisemitism everywhere we look. Living is hard enough without feeling like people you once esteemed could abandon your children to lifetimes of the old discrimination, isolation, violence and mass murder, and then their children in turn, until hundreds of years from now when again there's a brief blip of tolerance before the ancient curse of being Jewish continues.

One day soon I'll try to explain how it works again, but I wonder again and again, what difference does it make?

Saturday, March 2, 2024

Last Night's Concert

 I went to a fascinating but dispiriting concert last night.

It started with a nearly masterly performance of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony from an unlikely source. I often think that James Conlon would be happier with a career like Jaimie Laredo's, in front of chamber orchestras where he can do utterly unfashionable performances of Haydn and Mozart. What we heard last night was the most gemutlich, large orchestra, vibrato laden, old-Vienna performance of Schubert's Unfinished one will ever hear. You'd think it was Josef Krips up there. He must have spent hours getting that high cholesterol string sonority from Baltimore musicians still trained in David Zinman's period punchiness. It was just short of heavenly, with extremely un-Conlon like rubato and ostentatious detailing in the phrasing. He seems to have spent his entire career scaling down Wagner, Verdi and Shostakovich to sound more like Schubert and Mozart, while in Schubert and Mozart he does all the operatic things you'd expect from Verdi and Wagner. After three years of watching this guy, I just don't understand him: a vastly skilled musician who's performed all around the world for fifty years, but whose conception of music has never moved on from the mistaken values of 1970s Juilliard.
I should have left after that, because then came 50 minutes of 'automatic' Wagner, played like a machine that you simply turn on and off. Hardly any phrasing, hardly any detail, barely a memorable moment: generic, generic, generic.
But it is utterly unbelievable how Wagner's orchestration still fits the modern orchestra like a glove, every detail speaks in the concert hall with utter clarity. It's the exact opposite of the older masters. In Mozart, Schubert, Brahms you have to work endlessly hard to get the music's details to speak properly. Many claim it's different for them with a period instrument ensemble, but I'm far from convinced. In those three particularly, it's almost as if the expression in is so high minded that they're barely even conscious of what instruments they use, and the work is on the composers. It's as Joachim said of Brahms that they don't write for musicians, they write against musicians.
But contra his reputation, Wagner fits the capabilities of instrument so easily, even proper Wagner voices are supposed to find it easy to sing with the way he divides vocal parts through the entire vocal range - whereas Verdi stays planted all night long in the voice's top 20 percent,
There's a reason Wagner makes every detail register: he is the music of sociopathy, manipulating emotions in the audience so effortlessly that he does feel himself. In Schubert, such emotions are a confession by the not composer, human communication from one heart to another. But emotions that exist in Schubert like a partnership of equals becomes emotional manipulation in Wagner - designed to excite audiences to fever pitch. Perhaps Wagner skeptics like me would find our responses more easily exploited if today's singers were better. The Brunnhilde last night was Christine Goerke, possessing a power tool of a mid range with a vibrato through which you can sometimes fit a mac truck. Aside from Lisa Davidsen, this is the best we'll do today, and how can Wagner make its proper effect without voices to equal his charisma?
You can't blame the singers: the expectations of singers are so high today. Not even Wagner can account for today's huge halls, loud orchestral instruments, slow tempos, and relative lack of emphasis on vocal technique. No modern singer can get through Wagner without blowing out their voice in a couple years.

As I've said many times, as everybody's said many times, one can't deny Wagner's genius. He is, as Auden argued, possibly the greatest artistic genius of all time. Wagner's is an endlessly meaningful art, for which there is no bottom in the numbers of ways it can be analyzed, interpreted, and felt, but there are problems in Wagner that stick out like a sociopath amid normal people, and next to Schubert, he can sound paltry indeed. One excites and disturbs the soul, one nourishes it.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

What do I do?

 I have no idea what to believe at this point.

On the one hand, I'll stand with the Jewish community through any disingenuous approbation from people who stay silent in the face of every uncomplicated genocide everywhere but regarding the complicated actions of the world's only haven for Jews, and I no longer trust any friend who asks Israel to cease fire. You're asking Jews to just die willingly. So long as they don't call Israel a genocidal state publicly, I can stay friends with the hundreds who believe it, but not without resenting the hell out of them.
But I can't pretend there isn't an authoritarian curtain gone round the Jewish community long before October 7th, a curtain of steel that might lift only so slightly whenever Netanyahu goes. There is no pretending the modern Israel is not Netanyahu, and there is no pretending Israel wasn't deserving of blistering censure long before all this. The moment they ceased to be the state that pursued peace in this conflict, they began an agonizing moral slide that's gone on my entire adult life. Israel is as deserving of criticism as any other Western country that willingly welcomes right wing authoritarianism into its government, not much more, but around Israel's long authoritarian slide from Sharon to Smotrich, the Jewish community's formed a protective wall of incendiary rage. It's a pustule that needs a biopsy, and until we accept that it's a boil in need of the most painful lancing, the only chance to rid the region of radical Islamic parties is to so decimate Gaza and southern Lebanon that it would be a genocide indeed. Our long term choice is this: become again the side that pursues peace in the face of an enemy who demands war, or become the genocidal people our so called friends think we already are with offensives far worse than what's coming for Rafah.
I woke up October 7th and on that day said farewell to every chance the world will become anything I love. I was terrified of a bad outcome for the world before October 7th, but I wasn't certain of it. I've said it a hundred times, but Israel lives on the world's most dangerous fault line, and the seismic eruptions spread.
So now, I just can't see anything but the strange death of the liberal world in my time. After the biggest liberal gains since the 60s, this liberal rule of law is thoroughly decimated by right wing radicals, who are only enabled by a left's insistence on pushing reforms that are not even good, let alone practical. It seems to be an endemic feature of any historic period when liberals rack up victories: rather than celebrate, the people we most expect to celebrate want to smash it up, and an ever more resentful right wing is all too willing to help them.
On the one hand, anybody who hasn't ditched liberalism for leftism realizes there's no future for Israel without severely damaging Hamas. So far, the deaths are nearly 100% on Hamas, not Israel. The whole point of what Hamas did was to throw their own people into death and get willfully naive leftists to blame Israel for it. It's not antisemitic to criticize Israel, it's not antisemitic to think Israel went too far, but it's sure as hell antisemitic to expect us to turn the other cheek, and it's antisemitic to insist on ceasing fire the moment this all began. You expect Jews to die with no fight. What other group would you expect that of?
On the other hand, if Israel goes into southern Gaza, if they do not let aid in, it will be far from 100%. It's thoroughly out of touch with reality to expect you can get rid of Hamas. Until now, no matter how bloody, it's been self-defense. But an incursion into Rafah is simply vengeance. It's not genocide, but it's democide. And even if you get rid of Hamas, you've created a power vacuum where an organization as bloody or more than Hamas will rise. The best possible option is to not go into Rafah, let the aid come in, and make Palestinians so fear a repeat of these months that they would sooner rise up against Hamas than let them do it again. It's worked in Lebanon against Hezbollah for 18 years, it will likely work in Gaza. Not only does Israel not need to go into southern Gaza, going in will probably have the exact opposite of the desired result.
We have to face facts: some of hostages are not coming home without a colossally unfair prisoner exchange. It's just the name of the game. Let Hamas declare victory. 85% of Palestinians will realize at this point that any claim of victory is a thorough lie, including Hamas.
This is Israel: it's only a matter of months until they develop technology to monitor the tunnels.
In the meantime, I don't trust dozens of progressives for whom I have enormous affection. Many of them don't feel safe around people whom they think would not look out for their best interests, and now, I sure as shit don't feel safe around them. I'm no saint, but our friendship makes me feel dirty. The problems of Jews don't count for them. They excuse themselves by claiming you can separate Jews from Israel, and yet they don't. They hold the Jewish community responsible for its support of Israel. They say there is a conspiracy to support Israeli interests which they barely distinguish from the Jewish community. But they do exactly the same with the issues they care about.
On the other hand, Israel is going full speed ahead into a colossal, vengeful mistake. It was not a mistake to go into northern Gaza, but they've decimated the whole thing, pushed the entire population southward. It's enough. They're starting to make the Palestinian population starve to death, and now mean to push a million and a half people back into the north where they must starve amid the ruins. No words exist for a country that would do this except a state so dominated by military thinking that it's indistinguishable from an authoritarian dictatorship, and no word exists for people who'd willingly follow them except authoritarians.
How do you forgive a whole world that turns to evil?
All reactions

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Program Note for Performance on 3/23

 To Jewish music listeners whom it may concern,

You are about to listen to two pieces by Evan Tucker, one of many Jewish composers featured on this very Jewish concert. Evan Tucker is not the best composer on this program, but he can assure with relative certainty that he is among the most Jewish - raised to speak both Hebrew and Yiddish, two languages which he tries to forget with only some success, and was brought up with so much Jewish content that he never really learned math or science (by the way, he's learning disabled). Were it not for music, he would not have known a single non-Jew until he was 16.   

The two pieces are settings of biblical Psalms, all 150 of which were supposedly written by King David, but probably written by an assistant adjunct court poet paid part time for full time work while still paying off their student loan along with two side jobs, one in a furniture moving company and one waiting tables in a Jerusalem restaurant for tips. The Psalms are generally regarded as so boring that John Mulaney based a whole bit on how much people hate them, but they were meant to be chanted as music, not poetry, and as music have a history so long and illustrious that they range from Monteverdi and William Byrd to Stravinsky and Steve Reich. 

The first of these Psalms is the first of these Psalms: Psalm 1. Mr. Tucker wrote this work in 2009: nearly homeless, living on the couch of friends with nothing to his name but fifty dollars and Sibelius software. He had dreams of starting a chorus and achieving 'choral glory', whatever that means, and rather than fix up his life, he decided to begin a mad project, ambitious as only undertaken by the delusionally desperate. For this chorus he'd found he would write settings of all 150 Psalms over the course of a lifetime. A Jewish Music Apollo Program. As befits a traditional chorus, this is a very traditional Psalm setting, no doubt filled with subconscious echoes of the Chazzanus and Yiddishkeit from which he then felt deeply alienated. 

The choral glory ended, but the dream of the Psalms did not. It followed him everywhere for years thereafter with almost supernatural obsession, and by 2016 he decided to resume them as electronic works: Musique Concrete, representations of the divine whose performers would not be present in corporeal form. 

The second of these Psalms, Psalm 16, was written when he had no idea what his next Psalm should be, but he had an idea in his back pocket. Baroque composers would set the old Spanish dance, La Folia, to music, creating virtuoso instrumental variations on a very simple sixteen-bar harmonic scheme. Mr. Tucker wanted to do a version that took La Folia through all its many possibilities in electronic music. This was just to be one of a number of La Folia settings he would do through the Psalms whenever he couldn't come up with a new idea for the next Psalm. 

After eight years, or possibly fifteen, Mr. Tucker is now 18 psalms into his project. He figures he will procrastinate on the rest until he's seventy, then do them all in a single all nighter. 

Thursday, February 22, 2024

A Farewell to No Arms

 I had to defriend a guy I like for sharing an article accusing Israel of 'annihilation' in Gaza. Until I read it, I didn't think there was a word out there more hurtful to Jews than 'genocide', but annihilation is it. Annihilation, or 'vernichtung', was Hitler's exact word of intent for what he wanted to do to Jews. You might as well go all the way into medieval blood libels and say Israelis kidnap Palestinian babies, sacrifice them, and grind their bones into matzah.

When this all began, I prepared myself as best I could, knowing that the only way to ensure Jewish survival is hard, hard deeds that would make sick anybody with half their humanity intact. I prepared myself for hundreds of thousands of deaths before this all was done - not necessarily in Gaza but all around the Middle East. I haven't prepared myself for calling anything that happens a genocide - and I still think the accusation is the basest sort of antisemtism. Nevertheless, I prepared myself for the worst sort of butchery: in Gaza, in Lebanon, possibly in Syria, possibly the West Bank, possibly even Iran, and god knows where else. I knew that I'd have to dissociate from many friends, and while I couldn't avoid it, I knew that talking to other Jews and their pride in vengeance would make me take multiple showers.
Worst of all, I prepared myself for the worldwide death of every human sentiment I value until the world recovers its sense, possibly not before I'm an old man: the death of American liberalism, of Judaism that can coexist with secularism, of any rational root that knows that the stability of the world is more important than any reform, any revolution, any principle; because once it all falls down, none of us can stand upright in the rubble. This conflict isn't like Ukraine where there are clear cut heroes and villains, and fuck you for thinking there are, this is a fight for survival and resources among two people who deserve it. Israelis are punished for achieving success for the first time in thousands of years. Palestinians are perpetually punished, by the Ottomans and Crusaders and Byzantines before the Israelis, passed over for success while other peoples around the north Mediterranean are only saved from squalor by their proximity to Northern Europe.
Will the death toll be over 5% of Gazans by 2025? Only a fool would deny the possibility. Though I have no idea how they come up with these statistics: the Economist tells us that there is one functional toilet for every 220 Gazans, one shower for every 4,500. Two thirds of Gaza's hospitals are closed and the 13 functioning cannot possibly minister more than a fraction of their would be patients. Arif Husain, chief economist of the World Food Program, says that the scale and speed of Gaza's famine is without parallel. Well over half a million are going without food for more than a day at a time. Whole families are given nothing more than a tin of beans to survive a single day, a sack of flour costs ten times what it did pre-war, and nearly all Gaza's cash machines have long since had their holdings drawn out. By 2025, it's possible that more Gazans will die of famine than bombs.

A kleptocratic dictatorship like Hamas is exactly as bad as it seems, and there's no victory in war against a totalitarian regime unless you siege the population to the point the dictatorship collapses, but it's worth prolonging the war if it means getting the supplies to the Gazans, even if Hamas steals many of them and the war goes on longer, Israel can't afford this level of hatred directed against them.
It's not a genocide, but it's the world turned completely to its dark side. I'm not willing to go over the basics yet again, but I don't see another option. Jews are not going to lay down and die again just because you demand it. And yet, to do this without guilt, to keep making self-righteous justifications, to not search endlessly for a different way, to declare with simplicity: 'we're right', 'they're wrong', is fascist, authoritarian, it's anti-democracy barbarism, and makes a direct line to any number of justifications that declare war on democracy. Once you believe completely in the rectitude of your violence, there is nothing you can't justify, and it's only a matter of time before you make violent decisions out of reasons far more contemptible than necessity.
War is war. It is so much worse even than all but the bloodiest dictatorships, and there's no way to trust that the Netanyahu government will prosecute it with anything but selfish aims. It's no genocide, but it's the killing of ten to twenty thousand innocent civilians in just four months with many more yet marked for death, it's famine, and it's more bombs than the US ever used in twenty years of Afghan occupation many times over.
The roots of this conflict are much more complicated than any bad faith American radical/Euroleftist would ever allege. For fifty years they've called Jews white oppressors when we'd been killed at unprecedented speed and volume for not being white enough, they call Israel an illegal occupier when dictators from minority sects occupy Middle Eastern country after country, they call for their countries to divest from Israel when they owe their entire first world existence to the cheap labor of China and and the cheap oil of Saudi Arabia, both of whom violate human rights with a volume dozens of times more than Israel's; and most outrageously, they insist Israel solve a problem of refugees which their countries solved by simply murdering hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, and exiling millions more. The world holds Israel to a standard no other country is held, and then insists that unconscious antisemitism has nothing to do with their assumptions.
This is what it means to live as a Jew in the world, and often what it means to die as a Jew. But as much as you brace yourself for those realities, they sometimes come at you at light speed and all you can do is cry out to the god who puts us into these circumstances and seems to get his gratification from our suffering. We have paid every single price for our continued existence, and now the price of keeping ourselves alive is murder itself.

Monday, February 19, 2024

Another Three Mini-Essays #1: Where Are Our Navalnys?

 The reason we knew Navalny was the real deal was not because he was unimpeachably liberal, but because he wasn't.

Warts and all, Navalny made the compromises of a man who truly wanted to achieve a goal and not pose on ceremony. He believed in Greater Russia, he collaborated with 'Greater Russians', he maintained right to the end that Ukrainians and Belarussians were little more than Russians who didn't know they were Russian, he just didn't want to risk his whole country by going to war over it. He marched in the same right wing protests as ultranationalists, even neonazis. To the end of his life, he never truly repented.

Nelson Mandela never recanted on his periods of violent Marxism, Rabin never recanted the assaults he ordered on Palestinians over a period of 40 years. It makes no difference when a person whose conduct is above reproach wants peace or liberty, that's what you expect of them. But when a borderline authoritarian advocates peace and liberty, you take it seriously. They gained much of their power and respect through authoritarian methods, and to switch tactics to peace and negotiation puts their credibility on the line. *
It doesn't always work that way: all you have to do is look at Arafat, who to the end of his life could not let go of terrorism, but any authoritarian who offers peace puts his life on the line, and it's always an act of bravery for which they might pay with assassination.
Where is that bravery in Israel? Where is that bravery in the US? Where is that bravery in Gaza? In Russia, you're facing an authoritarian with an implacable mix of ruthlessness and power - Navalny's failure was all but assured. But here? There's a chance. Israel? There's a chance. Gaza? Well... so many potential Palestinian leaders are sitting in Israeli prisons where their lives are currently safer than they'd ever be in Palestinian territories. Is there no longer even one Republican congressman willing to stand up to Trump? Is there not one Israeli figure of consequence willing to say that offering a two-state solution is more important than ever now? Is there not one Palestinian leader willing to condemn Hamas's actions publicly?

* I might add, this is why I firmly believe that Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince is serious about his offer to broker peace.

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Voweled Words

 It doesn't feel like two weeks since I set pen to keyboard. In fact it feels like two days ago. Nerve and morale are things you either feel or don't, and lately I've felt a complete lack of it, but the result of not writing is a mind that goes to seed. There's a reason I maniacally graphed my way through my thirties, and it's because without the words, there were just racing thoughts, and if the thoughts didn't focus on a subject, they always loomed on me, and only dread ever came out of that.


I have no thoughts that will endear me to anybody. I am growing more and more alarmed by Israel, but I have no faith in any righteousness in the Palestinian cause until getting rid of Hamas becomes a larger priority than getting rid of Israel.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see a way out of Israel simultaneously becoming both an isolated international pariah and an authoritarian state where a semi-permanent narrow coalition holds together a state that grows asymptotically close to that dreaded a-word... I'm not going to say it because I don't want to stir the pot that badly.

We are heading to that critical moment when Israel's Arab population is larger than its Jewish. When we hit that moment, Israel no longer has legitimacy as a Jewish state. Period.

The only way it can become a Jewish state again is through ethnic cleansing, the forced deportation of Palestinians to... who even knows where... believe it or not there are worse fates than ethnic cleansing, does anybody really think it's doing Palestinians any good to stay in Gaza? But who in their right mind can support with any enthusiasm a state so morally compromised that it deports longstanding populations with impunity? Again?

My support of Israel is unshaken, but my belief in Israel is getting very thin. No liberal can believe in a country that has a far right government in near-perpetuity, whether elected or imposed.

I'm not so naive to believe that the world can't support all manner of dictatorships, but my support of Israel draws ever closer to becoming the support of an authoritarian state. I'm beginning to view it as a partnership of convenience little different than support of Saudi Arabia. I obviously see the necessity of heavy operations in Gaza, I can even be convinced of the necessity of Rafah, but the longer this war goes, the less convinced I get.
All reactions:

Thursday, February 1, 2024

Very Brief Piping Hot Israel take

 

On the one hand, BDS (boycott, divestment, sanction, not K-Pop band) is antisemitic. If you believe in it, I won't stop being your friend, but I will yell at you very loudly and you will probably stop being my friend.
But until Israeli settlers stop lynching Palestinians in the West Bank, settlers should temporarily be barred from travelling to any country in the world, no matter their beliefs. The fact that Netanyahu is not insisting on prosecuting this to the fullest extent would be an impeachable offense in any functional government, but Netanyahu has a vested interest in keeping Israel as dysfunctional as he can.
It's one thing if you live beyond the Green Line because of affordability, you've become collateral damage and I'd feel sorry for you in whatever population transfer eventually comes, but any person who'd believe in the necessity of Israeli settlements has long since become nearly everything the world accuses Israel of being.

Park School


To talk about the war today, I'm going to talk about a local story taking place at a school I didn't go to.
And we begin by talking about its location.
If Park School's location didn't exist you couldn't make it up. It exists at the border of two very particular realities: right where Old Court Road meets Falls Road. Drive just a block down Old Court Road and you get to Pikesville - Jewish Baltimore, where something like 90,000 Jews are said to live in a 5ish mile radius. Turn onto Falls Road in either direction and you get to goysiher Baltimore - not just goyim as in non-Jews, but goyim as a very particular subspecies of white person: upper middle class WASPS and Anglo- Catholics, and of a more recent vintage, Irish and Italians and Germans who want to live like WASPS. By now, this definition of goyim has grown so broad that it comprises people of color who like WASPy ways, and even Jews who marry out.
Park has always been the place for Jews who didn't want to Jewish, and goyim who didn't want to be goyish. Miserable at my first high school, I wanted to go to Park School for my second half. Park was the kind of progressive school where creative, individualistic, different drummer kids went, and a full third of those kids were Jewish. It was a school for Pikesville Jews who wanted to be defined more as liberals and universalists than as Jews - and therefore a place many Jews-with-a-capital-J looked at with extreme suspicion. In their minds, Jewish families sent kids to Park as a means to betray their Jewish heritage; but it should have been clear years before that that I badly needed a school like that.
It was too late for me to turn that ship around for a hundred reasons - principal among them being I was a bad student: learning disabled and emotionally discombobulated, I applied and didn't get in. The admissions director commented from my essay that I'd be one of the school's best writers, but one of my own teachers recommended I not be accepted in their recommendation letter. Another friend of mine transferred at the same time and he got in. He didn't even tell me he was applying. I remember going to his graduation party two years later, feeling completely dejected among all these high achieving kids who were about to go to the best liberal arts colleges in the country: places like Swarthmore, Williams, Bates, Mount Holyoke, Pomona, Harvey Mudd, to say nothing of the Ivies...
I don't know if Park School is a place that sees the world with any sense of reality, but I'm certain Park School's reality would be quite nicer for me.
A quarter century later, Park is grabbing local headlines. To show you what's happening, I'm going to reprint part of the story here as reported in the Baltimore Banner (please, everybody subscribe to it):
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"Students at The Park School of Baltimore were five minutes into a Zoom call with two Swarthmore College professors on Friday when the screen went black. School leadership had shut down the internet.
The video call was an attempt by some students to take matters into their own hands when school leaders abruptly canceled an assembly on the war in Israel and Gaza. Angry with the decision, student government members contacted the professors who’d been scheduled to speak — Sa’ed Atshan, a Palestinian, and Moriel Rothman-Zecher, a Jewish Israeli citizen — and announced in a schoolwide email that the talk was on.
The school’s leadership wasn’t having it.
The Park School is the latest local institution where passionate discourse about the conflict in the Middle East has turned to controversy.
Students walked off campus in protest of the school’s recent action, with the support of “many” faculty, Paradis wrote to the school community Sunday.
“While the students’ goals and rationale — and indeed their commitment to advocating for what they believe they and their fellow students were ready to experience — were clearly articulated, their actions countermanded my cancellation message of the previous day,” Headmaster Paradis wrote.
The originally scheduled talk had been canceled because the speakers “express views and use rhetoric that are not in keeping with what we understood to be their planned program,” Paradis wrote in a Thursday email explaining the decision. He said he wants students to be engaged in difficult conversations but added, “We must find ways to do so that yield constructive, not corrosive or harmful, dialogue.”
Atshan and Rothman-Zecher had been scheduled to speak in person to the campus’s Upper School, or high school, at 9:45 a.m. Friday. But the school emailed the two on Thursday afternoon informing them that the event was canceled, Rothman-Zecher said, telling them “some of your rhetoric does not align with what our community currently needs.”
The email singled out Atshan in particular, but did not make it clear what rhetoric of his was deemed objectionable.
Atshan is an associate professor and chair of the peace and conflict studies department at Swarthmore . Rothman-Zecher is a visiting assistant professor of creative writing and novelist who teaches creative writing at Swarthmore, a liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia.
They have similar viewpoints, Rothman-Zecher said. Both are queer pacifists who oppose the war in Gaza and the occupation and believe “that everyone is deserving of justice and freedom.” They were never invited to debate each other at The Park School, he said.
“It was a space of openness and curiosity and not a space of pushing in a uniform perspective,” he said. “I was looking forward to speaking with the students [at Park] about the role I see for art and literature in broadening our minds,” he said. “I am still looking forward to that.""
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I have no idea what the aforementioned 'rhetoric' would have been, though one can guess they'd freely use words like 'genocide', 'apartheid', 'imperialism' and 'settler-colonialism.' I also imagine that had a speaker from the Israeli embassy come to Park School they would be escorted off the premises before they got past that weird mansion you see from Old Court Road.
I'm sure there are pro-Israel parents and alumni at Park who threatened to withdraw their donations, and I'm sure there are pro-Israel students who feel completely isolated right now. No private school's administration is so stupid that they don't know on which side the bread is buttered; and if firing over an Israel issue can happen to an Ivy League president, it can certainly happen to high school administrators. But Park is the sort of place that creates radicals and the cutting edge. The very fact that being anti-Israel's actions is subversive enough to create an event like this will make the cause all the more appealing to students.
I also have little doubt at that as a 17-year-old Park student I would have lead that walkout and happily given my parents a coronary. It wasn't because of my vast comprehension of foreign affairs and statecraft when I was 17. It's because was utterly fed up with the parochialism of Jewish Baltimore, which I saw as an impediment to my being able to lead a quality life. Like so many 17 year olds, I was going crazy with understanding what seemed beyond my elders: not understanding of politics, understanding how we were all dying a little from the rigidity of a religious upbringing.
The heavy burdens of my youth are a quarter-century ago. I'm almost 42 now, and I don't put as much premium on quality of life anymore, but I'm still fed up with Pikesville's bullshit. I retain a small measure of contempt for the rigidity my community of origin espouses. My life alone doesn't mean much, but there is a direct line between that rigidity and the gathering authoritarian storm that threatens us all.
Correspondingly, there's a line between that rigidity and the opposition to it. Both have authoritarian roots. The latter sympathizes with Hamas in all but name, the former sympathizes in all but name with Putin. None of them may realize it, but that is the result of their beliefs. It's all the same desire to simplify life to the point that whole classes of people are the enemy. That's not the truth. The truth is that the world is made up of billions of complicated people doing the best they can in the face of sociopaths telling them that the world has billions of villains rather than thousands.
So even if politics is a lot more complicated than I realized, having sympathy for people who are different than you is complicated too, and few people are better at simplifying their eccentrics into non-persons than Jews in Baltimore.
But this is about Park, not Pikesville's bullshit. Every city in America has a Park School: a school for the kids of upper-middle class parents who think that unlike them, their kids should be free to minimize life's bullshit and not compromise their personalities or interests for life's demands. Hell, most cities in America have two of them, because while I didn't get into Park, I got waitlisted at Friends.
But inevitably, with the minimizing of bullshit comes the belief that life can and should be free of bullshit. Should it be free? I'm sure that's true, we're all sure that's true. Can it be free? Come on, we all should know better by now. Life itself is bullshit. It's bills to pay and bosses to assuage, children to entertain and parents to appease. Getting rid of capitalism won't change that, neither will getting rid of government, neither will getting rid of religion, neither will sweeping science's findings under the rug. 98% of life is the process of what we have to do to keep life going, and if you spend your time contemplating life rather than doing what's expected of you, you go far more crazy than you would if you just spent your life fulfilling your responsibilities.
This surfeit of opportunities, this conviction that life does not mean to insult us, this belief that life is something better than one foot in front of the other in a world that roots for our failure, is precisely what leads to life being exactly that. Accept that the world sucks, we can make the world somewhat better, shake your fist at the world and tell it that it's not good enough, the world gets much, much worse.
20th century Europe was littered with the verbiage of intelligentsia who supported totalitarian regimes because they promised utopia against all evidence that intellectuals were the first to be shot. If they were from 21st century Baltimore, the majority of them would have come from schools like Park or Friends, or magnet schools like Carver and BSA.
Don't misunderstand, these places don't produce naive radicals by coddling their students, but they do exactly what they're charged with doing: they protect their students from knowing just how bad the world has it, and therefore when they develop some vague idea of how bad the world is, they think a transformative solution will make it better rather than worse. And in thinking so, a disproportionate number their students fall into ideologies that root for totalitarians as much as any fundamentalist Christian education would.
Schools for quirky kids like Park, and the quirky liberal arts colleges they feed into, lead to better lives for their students where smart kids can grow up to be innocent of the mendacious ways of the world. I would have paid any price, born any burden, to live in that kind of innocence, and I'm painfully jealous of the hundreds of millions worldwide who have it.
But that freedom comes at a price for the rest: the world these people think they fight for doesn't exist. They go off to college ready to embrace anticolonialism and radical critical theory, not realizing that the organizations they advocate for would throw them into prison the moment they achieve power, then throw the rest of us too.
Gaza is not the USSR under Stalin. Russia is the world's largest country, whereas Hamas controls one of the world's smallest, but had Hamas a territory as big as the USSR, they'd be just as murderous as Stalin ever was. There is no civil rights struggle in Gaza until Hamas is gone and Fatah is reconstituted from the ground up. Until then, the only hope is Israel's success. Their quarrel is not against Israel, their fight is against Netanyahu and Likud, but so long as they're encouraged to mouth half-quotes from cultish radical theorists whose entire theories exist to be brainwashing, the world of the Left will continue to fight the wrong fight, and the triumph of the Right is a foregone conclusion: be that Right Christian, Islamic, or Jewish.
Unless the left keeps allying with the same causes as Hamas. So if you win, good luck enacting your agenda with those allies.