Wagner: A Shocking Statement

On the eve of The Ring's 150th anniversary, let me state something absolutely shocking.

Siegfried is Wagner's greatest opera.

It's a realization I came to just a few days ago. I realize I'm the only person in the history of opera who believes this, but it is the opera where Wagner truly became himself and extended to his full plumage. Even in Rheingold and Walkure he was still developing: Rheingold is a spectacle, and like a lot of spectacles, it has elements of clunk even as large parts are just as magnificent as they seem. Die Walkure is literally the most iconic opera ever written. So why is that not where Wagner became himself? Listen to Wotan and Fricka nattering on in Act II, listen to Wotan and Brunnhilde natter on in Act III. For all the great set pieces in Act III, for all the perfection of Act I, he is still, even this late, figuring out the differences between the singing of arias and the declamation of music drama. Die Walkure is a towering achievement, a tour-de-force where myth and human feeling are held in an impossible balance. Walkure and Aida are the culmination of 'grand opera,' but in both you it ascending to the top of an olympus atop everything which came before: so much in Walkure clearly owes itself to Der Freischutz. You can furthermore hear the storm of Beethoven's Pastroral in the Prelude, you can hear the opening movement of the 7th in the Ride of the Valkyries, For all the darkness and the way Wagner uses chromaticism in Walkure, the chromaticism is a tool, not a fabric. At base its figures are still diatonic.

But from the very beginning of Siegfried, we have arrived in a harmonic and coloristic language so much stranger than anything which came before. It's a kind of chromaticism, but it's not the pre-atonal chromaticism of Gotterdammerung, nor is it the undefinable chromaticism of Tristan. It is chromaticism grounded in the 6/3 chord so important to Debussy, and yet the orchestration is anything but Debussyian. The orchestration is so sharp and spiky that I always thought it sounded like Schoenberg.

There are surely moments in Rheingold that have this strangeness, particularly among the Niebelungen, but they are passing moments in an opera that begins in 4 minutes of E-Flat and ends in the full blaze of D-flat brass ostinatos. Siegfried operates from a base of chromaticism: the chromaticism is so omnipresent that we take it for granted--it's a forest rain that only begins to lift when the bird points Siegfried toward Brunnhilde.

Is the harmony and orchestration of Siegfried a metaphor for a new sort of hero? I never put anything past Wagner, but so much of the artistic imagination happens in the subconscious that not having read Wagner's letters I'm not even sure he was aware of it (there are some people whose company you don't want too much...). There is no real precedent for this language: perhaps a lot of the orchestral color comes from Berlioz, but I would have to listen more deeply to find exactly where. Surely a few of the harmonies must come from Liszt. There's even a place in Walkure Act II where Wagner is surely quoting the opening of the Faust Symphony, but whereas the beginning of the Faust Symphony spells out a full twelve-tone row, Wagner makes it diatonic again.

But Siegfried, like Otello, is the beginning of something entirely new: opera as high drama, not music with dramatic accompaniment. Music becomes declamed, not sung. Perhaps Mozart already did it in a very different way, but Mozart is higher than drama--he is the only dramatic creator who can match Shakespeare, and like the Bard he makes his own rules to capture the whole human story. Wagner may not be playing the full Shakespearean keyboard for which he clearly aims to master, but beginning in Siegfried, he does achieve the ecstatic grandeur of Aeschylus and high play of Aristophanes.

Beginning in Otello, Verdi achieves as much grandeur as Shakespeare in his second tier plays (which are still better than everyone else's.); but poor Verdi only got there in his dotage. Wagner got there by his mid-40s, and managed to write four full music dramas at this level: a total of something like 17 hours of a concentrated new artform against Verdi's 4. It would be left to Strauss, Janacek and Berg to take their mantle and create a canon of opera possessing an uncanny sublimity beyond grandeur.

Siegfried is the most unloved of Wagner's most mature operas. It is unloved because of Wagnerians who don't understand that it's supposed to be funny. It's an adventure comedy, an 18th century picaresque novel where Siegfried goes on bizarre adventures, full of crude, cruel jokes. It is much easier to find forerunners of Siegfried in literature than music: Pantagruel, Tom Jones, Quixote and Sancho Panza, and especially that ultra-violent comic novel of the thirty years war: Simplicius Simplissisimus (if you wanted to find a historical setting for The Ring, the Thirty Years War is ideal).

The root of Siegfried is crude, brutal comedy, almost sadistically so. If it doesn't sound like the forerunner of Till Eulenspiegel and the descendent of Beethoven's 8th, the musicians have missed the point. The Bayreuth sound, god bless it, is so organic for Wagner, but then you hear a great performance of Siegfried (and there aren't many) and you realize that there are elements of Wagner which it can't possibly capture.

Siegfried needs a great comic opera conductor who can mine that score for every obnoxious sound implicit in the texture: Kleiber, Fricsay, Cluytens, Gui, Harnoncourt, Mackerras. I'd like to hear it done with half an orchestra and get a bunch of Rossini musicians to do it in Italian: Luigi Alva, Gabriel Bacquier, Fernando Corena... It would sound much more modern than Rossini, perhaps even like Stravinsky, but everybody would recognize that effervescence. Everybody in Siegfried is ridiculous, every situation in Siegfried is absolutely ridiculous.

Until you get to that ending...

The Ring is not four works, it's two. The first is a light to darkness to light journey that begins in Das Rheingold and ends in Act II of Siegfried. It is a piece full of magic, but the magic exists on this plane: it is not the music of transcendence. The second is a series of transfigurations, the first is when the hero who knows no fear sees a woman for the first time. Siegfried begins in a fog of B-Flat Minor, but when Siegfried kisses Brunnhilde, what key is it? E-Major, pure E-Major, the most distant key for the most distant journey traversed.

But that is not the only transcendence. The Ring begins in E-Flat, and here, it reaches E. The hero has the Ring, balance will supposedly be restored soon: but the world can never be quite the same. The hero has ascended to a new wisdom, and therefore so has the world. E-Flat must then become E.

I used to think Wagner put down The Ring because he got tired of it. But then I realized, not even Wagner could come up with that transfiguration music. He wasn't ready to find that musical metaphor, and out of Siegfried were birthed two new ideas for how to create drama utterly unlike any precedent. After two acts of Siegfried's 6/3 based chromaticism, he had to pass through the fire of Tristan and Mathilde Wiesendonck to advance, and then in the wake of his affair with Cosima von Bulow, he had to (lovely human he was...) confront the possibility that Cosima might leave him for someone more appropriately her age.

Tristan to Meistersinger is a journey from the ultimate chromaticism someone could think of in the mid 1850s back to the ultimate diatonicism. And in that tension, I think Wagner found the solution to Siegfried's transformation. One music critic I like once put the idea like this:

A I/III progression in music has always evoked nostalgia, the longing to return. Wagner reverses it: III/I is a progression that came to mean the longing for something new. Siegfried ends in a blaze of C-Major, The explorer has landed in the new world.

Tristan is perhaps the ultimate opera of love. Die Meistersinger is perhaps the ultimate opera of love renounced. Siegfried is perhaps the ultimate opera of love discovered. It was during the composition of these three operas that he experienced his Wiesendonck debacle, and then the debacle of the Bulows. I wonder if it took Wagner the experience of both before he realized how easily love can be lost and that even for genius, the presence of love is in no way guaranteed.

This is obviously not a perfect Siegfried, and yet it is my favorite official recording I've heard in years and years. Rattle gets the comedy, he gets the melos, he gets the profundity, and he's particularly great at finding those odd, odd sounds which populate Siegfried like poisonous plants in a witch's garden. He does not make the opera as dangerous as someone who can unleash the full mass of Bayreuth forces like Barenboim, but there is so much right here. The Bavarian Radio Symphony, my favorite modern orchestra in garb either Kubelik or Jansons, is sounding more like their Kubelik years. They can switch on a dime between their blended old world sound and aural spikes that stab, and dart back and forth split second to second.

What of the singers? Well, it's modern Wagner....

More Ideas for Tales of Modern Collaboration

Holocaust Survivor on a Kibbutz in 1960, having to deal with Sabras making fun of him for what a sheep he was for not fighting against his capture. One day he finally has enough at a central committee meeting, explodes and beats them all, even with their soldier training.  Later he is sent out to deal with a person who sells farm equipment. The salesman explodes in Yiddish while the survivor gets defensive, which is only seen by a group of teenagers, but they don't speak Yiddish so they have no idea what was said. So while he's out in the fields they break into his home, where they find pictures of him as an Olympic boxer in Poland. One of the group refuses to break in and refuses to talk to them for a few days. Turns out the kid speaks Yiddish, and he says the salesman recognized him as a Judischer Ordungsdiest (Jewish Ghetto Police) in Warsaw who beat his brother to paralysis. He's summoned before the central committee and given a hearing: he defends himself by saying 'you have no idea what it was like. We who survived did everything we had to to make it.' He is cleared of charges, goes back to his job. "Nobody spoke to him anymore but he was never made fun of again." 

Wittgenstein and Hitler in the same gymnasium class. Wittgenstein continually humiliates Hitler. 

Early Nazi party meetings. It starts as politics and devolves into discussions of art and literature in great nuance during which they discuss the artists they later ban at length and in great detail. At the next meeting they resolve to bring their instruments so they can play chamber music together.  

The Adventures of the Einsatzgruppen: educated intelligent man with a PhD, constant access to methamphetamines, seeing his fellow members killing, burning, raping, fucking each other, cannibalizing and mutilating their way through Eastern Europe. At first perhaps he views it with horror, but as the drugs take over he decides it can be noble if he turns it into a science experiment. He decides to enact the most depraved things of which he can conceive as a series of experiments and record the results. 

Eichmann goes to Israel in 1937 with Herbert Hagen. He meets with Ben-Gurion and the Grand Mufti about the possibility of resettling Jews in Israel. The Mufti insists that he will simply repatriate the Jews to Nazi territory or form a final solution. Then meets with Ben-Gurion, who insists on speaking German to Eichmann, Eichmann insists on speaking Yiddish to Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion says that of course the Mufti said that he would either deport Jews back to the Nazis or he will kill them. Hagen says that the Jewish state clearly has ears everywhere if they know what the Mufti said. Ben-Gurion says that's nonsense, everyone knows what the Mufti would do. Eichmann says that perhaps if Ben-Gurion did confidence building measures to appease the Mufti and forswore a state perhaps the Mufti would let Jews in, to which Ben-Gurion blows up and accuses Eichmann of being the Mufti's propaganda stooge. 'And where would you put them?' 'Perhaps in camps until they can be resettled.' 'Resettled!? The Jews would never be resettled! They would be the majority of the population and would sit in those camps for a hundred years until the Palestinians finally annihilate them!' 'But I've spoken with the Mufti, he is not..' 'THE MUFTI IS JUST TRYING TO GET YOU ALL TO DO WHAT HE WANTS SOMEONE ELSE TO DO! YOU DON'T WANT THE JEWS, HE DOESN'T WANT THE JEWS, THE ONLY OPTION IS DEATH! I DARE YOU TO TRY! GO AHEAD! DO IT! KILL YOUR JEWS! I DARE YOU! I DARE YOU! YOU WOULD NOT SURVIVE THE CENSURE OF THE WORLD! YOU WOULD NOT SURVIVE CENSURE BEFORE GOD! THE THIRD REICH WOULD FALL BEFORE IT EVEN BEGAN AND BERLIN WOULD BE A CITY MORE BURNED THAN JERUSALEM!' Hagen and Eichmann leave Ben-Gurion's office in silence. 

A day in the life of Auschwitz told from the point of view of Hurbinek: the silent three year old whom Primo Levi documents in Survival at Auschwitz. He speaks the 'divine tongue of infants' which no adult human understands. Prisoners take turns taking care of Hurbinek until each dies in turn. He has survived by staying silent. He does not cry, but he has not learned to speak. He talks of the transfer to Auschwitz in the cattle car, and how he saw a mother smother her child so the child would not have to endure what came next. Others on the cattle car make suicide pacts and stab each other. Others pray while others mock, one young couple has sex in front of the whole car, others laugh and tell jokes. Don't know yet about how to describe the work detail and the death marches and the barracks. It ends with Hurbinek taken to the gas chamber where a woman holds him like a mother and sings to him. She says to him 'don't let go. I'm here. I love you.' It turns out the woman is an angel, she drives Hurbinek in a chariot to heaven. It ends with him arriving: 'and there was mameh.'

The Nazi neighborhood in Buenos Aires. 

Eichmann trial witnesses and their attempts to put their lives back together (need to watch trials...). 

Certainty: Parts 1 and 2

Part 1:

I'm a good lover, I'm an even better hater. Some of us carry a lot of resentments, and it's very easy to deposit them when you have an entire virtual space at your disposal: you can count yourself a king of infinite slop.

But hatred is easy, blaming others is easy. If you want an answer to a question, it was always easy to find one regardless of its truth, but in the era of the internet you can be convinced of something wrong within a literal three seconds.

The struggle is for the truth, the struggle is for the patience to find it, the struggle is to not quiet all the doubts on the path to your search, a struggle made doubly hard by the unfortunate certainties upon your path to the wrong answers.

The point is to doubt, the point is to question, and the point is to not cease the questioning once you think you've found the answers. You'll inevitably get things wrong along the way, but the biggest certainty is that certainty is the most lethal force in the world. Doubts kill us slowly, certainties can kill us all at once.

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I've felt my body being un-right as un-right gets for a young man, basically for as long as I can remember, and finally I think I know the reason. I just got a diagnosis I've long suspected: for a decade I thought I had a heart condition. Nobody really believed it. Last year I found out I had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. I was told it was a benign form. It's not. This week I was told the condition is serious: even a little more serious than I thought it was. Not necessarily lethal, but roughly the same as finding out you have MS or stage 1 or 2 cancer. I may be here in 50 years, I may be gone tomorrow. For the moment, I mean to do as much with whatever time I have as the healthiest man alive.

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I saw Bob Dylan two weeks ago at Wolf Trap. I'm not really a Dylan person. I respect the game, I respect how he still tours at 85 all the time and is still writing really good songs, but he's not for me.

But after the concert two of my best friends informed me why he's been touring non-stop since the year before I was born: he views stopping as death. He may be onto something: Dylan has a mission, he has a reason, and he keeps going year after year, lasting through all the seasons of life, all the seasons of his reputation, all the seasons of personal difficulty, all the seasons quality in his writing and performing. Motivation helps when you get 1 billion dollars in intellectual property, record sales and merch, but that wasn't enough to motivate nearly every other rock star the same way.

The moment I heard that, I resolved to write every day of my life. For years I've felt my body being un-right as un-right gets for a young man, and finally I think I know the reason.

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Here's the worst thing about dying now. I'd get the smallest funeral I'd probably have in the history of my life. At my father's funeral he got nearly 500 on the week before school when everybody was away. Had he died a few weeks later he'd get 700.

I'd get a couple hundred: they'd mostly be my parents' friends and contacts. Some from my brothers. But from me? Well, there was a time when I'd get a hundred or two of my own, but that was the DC days, the early Baltimore days. I'd be lucky to get 50 or 60 now. I'd be consoled that more than 100 would genuinely mourn me, but I doubt they'd be able to haul ass to the funeral in two days (can you? Pleeeeease?).

But at this point in my life, most of my friends are in other towns and we talk online. The vast majority of my Baltimore friendships have gone the way of all flesh. Maybe they're busy, maybe they don't like me, maybe I don't like them. I never quite figured it out and I never quite fit with a bunch of cycling hipsters and rock geeks who drink as much in their 40s as I did in my 20s. How do they keep it up? Well, apparently they don't have heart conditions.

They're good people: better perhaps than I, but they are so fucking certain of the ways of the world. I am not, and their security makes me insanely jealous. It will give them long lives of relative calm. Paradoxically, I was kept around by many of them for the negativity of my tongue: they seemed both scared of me and to find it very funny. I never made any secret of how little we had in common and how stupid their 'ways' were, and somehow, they seemed to enjoy it.

But they were never really my people, and eventually many of us tired of each other. It is a terrible thing to contemplate the end in your mid-40s, not knowing whom your people are, knowing that there aren't many people you leave behind that miss your constant presence.

Perhaps this is the legacy by which I can keep them company after my absence. Maybe they'll find me a better friend when they don't have to deal with me directly.

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My Zaydie, like my father, was a witty but difficult man: unlike me, who is as easy as a summer breeze. He wore a suit and watch to everything because to him, that's what a businessman does. He would obsess about his clothing, obsess about social slights, and obsess about his funeral.

I'm sure the main thing is that he didn't want a small crowd. But I think he also didn't want a Rabbi talking all the time about Hashem.

Unfortunately he had a subdural hematoma at 59 after falsely being told he had a heart attack and falling out of his hospital bed. They sent him home and he literally screamed in head pain until my med student uncle yelled over the phone for him to be readmitted to the hospital. He was never the same: aphasic, slurred, and just as difficult. He lived another thirty years, twenty compos mentis, and said it would have been better if he'd died.

I am not only in danger of heart events but also brain events. I certainly fear sudden death or the pain of a heart attack, but I suppose I fear a stroke more. I can deal with physical debilitation, I may even be able to deal with slurred speech, but the idea of a compromised brain is more than I can fathom. Some of us write so we may not die. I can deal with anything so long as I have the ability to write, words or music, but take away them both and I will be very short for this earth.

Zaydie was not frequent in his use of humor by the time I knew him, but he had his moments. When his and my father's business partner died, the Rabbi talked only about Hashem and not Mr. Goldman at all. Zaydie's comment to my father? "If Goldman had been there to see his funeral he would have died."

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Part 2:

It is so easy to be jealous.

Easier still because I sometimes think I'm a kind of Forrest Gump whom through no great achievements of his own got connected to some of the most consequential organizations in America. As I never tire of saying: I went to homecoming with Haley Stevens (I did not, however, 'stick it to her.' ... ... I stand by this joke). While in college I worked as a journalist under people who are involved deeply in the Washington Post and ABC News along with a relative who is a macher at the Associated Press. I've had multiple friends with positions in the White Houses of Bush and Obama, and multiple acquaintances who were deeply involved in Trump investigations. Acquaintances are Ivy League professors, literal hundreds of acquaintances and friends who studied at Ivy League schools. Many friends are now at the very top of their professions in law, science, medicine, business and engineering. In a college acting class I once ran a scene with someone who's now a B-list Broadway star and was in a theater program with someone who seemed to enjoy my company who's now a B-list Hollywood director.

None of this is extraordinarily connected for any person. It is, however, extraordinary for a person of lifelong underachievement. I was as smart as any of them, but learning and emotional debilitations prevented me from reaching for the stars they took for granted would always be there.

For years, decades even, the bitterness was overwhelming, and it's still there. Perhaps it will have contributed in some small part to shortening my lifespan. I was smart, I was capable, I had every gift except the gifts of organization (and height...), and feel like I've done nothing with them. I'm sure I could have tried harder, but the despair and terror of the difficulty was so very intense.

I heard I was smart too often when I was young. It was the worst thing I could have heard, and now I watch the world pass by and I cannot help but howl to myself about the rotten hand I was dealt and the still rottener way I played it.

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One of the certainties of life: when the mind suffers, the body suffers with it, and the older I get, the more the body takes over from the mind.

I wish one could describe the extent of major anxiety and depression to one who hasn't experienced it, but I fear no one could. People say that the experience of illness cannot truly be recalled in moments of wellness, and just like I doubt a person with migraines could explain migraines sufficiently to someone who has not experienced them nor can the experience be completely recalled in moments without their presence. In the same way I doubt a person who has experienced major depression or major anxiety can recall exactly what it's like in the moments when they are not that way because the mind which would recall it is experiencing flight from precisely that state.

In the same way, I can only recall a general state of what depression and anxiety is, but I cannot recall the specific experiences of it. It would be impossible, and it would be furtherly impossible to describe it to those who've never been to those countries. They are pains that are deeply physical, alter one's sense of time and space, alter your sense of movement, alter one's perception of literally every life event and maintenance. It is a literal alternate body within the body. A second person, a shadow self, whom you become under moments of pressure.

What one does know is that you do not truly recover from it. Like diabetes, like MS; like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, once you're in, you're in: permanently altered, your life is defined by managing it, and you know with absolute certainty that sometimes, these black dogs will win.

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What's there to do but bear witness: witness to joys, witness to suffering, and witness to mistakes?

Not just to the mistakes you've made yourself, but to the mistakes others have made. Your shit stinks just as much as ours does, and every time someone claims that they have answers, my eyes glaze with the same anger you feel as all our raised hearts take over our atrophied brains. But the reasons are inevitably reciprocal, maybe your lives, dear readers, were simple enough that answers felt easy to ascertain: mine has not been. Simple explanations are luxuries reserved for the entitled.  

I am not certain of much, but I am certain of the presence of a snake oil that grips people's minds like predatory worms. Each person peddling them becomes both victim and perpetrator, addict and pusher, mentors who turn their pupils' brains to pulp. This mush is called ideology. 

Ideological certainties are insults, moral insults to the universe's most sublime forces, and intellectual insults that devolve ostensibly smart human beings into sniveling rodents. 

Lots of ideologues say that every belief is an ideology, they tell us that to even be anti-ideology is to be ideological. Quite so. The human body also has 50 benign tumors for every one that kills you. Ideology is designed to be the cancer that kills the body, and once the body is dead, the ideology promises resurrection. 

The irony is that often the ideologies do provide a type of resurrection, but it's a resurrection for a far off people we've never met. Europe fought for democracy for 200 years, They got it, but somewhere around 150 million people had to be killed. Meanwhile, the place that enjoyed the easiest fruits of European efforts was here in the good ol' US of A. 

America fights now for equality: racial, gender, sexuality, perhaps even class. Somewhere else will doubtless get the equality America wants for itself long before we do, but we're just at this fight's beginning, and the price tag could eventually well exceed 150 million.

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I could describe the ideological silos through which we all live, but we all know them. And we all pretend to bemoan it even as we're kind of in love with them. Liberals often want to shun conservatives to protect their way of life, conservatives often want to crush liberals to protect theirs. Socialists? Well, they don't even have residual attachments to any part of America. They just want to just bring the whole thing down so they can build some grandiose dream in its place. And libertarians? Well, they just want to bring the whole thing down...

And it doesn't stop at politics. Tech bros have this strange dream of an innovation paradise where businessmen are free to innovate free of regulation and heedless of consequence, many of which will inevitably be disastrous. Academics and artists have dreams of an equality paradise where people can cast off their oppressions and be equals because they can resolve conflicts by already agreeing on everything. Businessmen and investors constantly think the stock market will go up and up and up without ever wiping out a country into another great depression. National security workers think we can simply change the world into a battle fortress to insure ourselves against terror, (take a deep breath everybody) doctors and scientists think we can run the country along ideal medical regulations without taking the realities of people's jobs into account. We shall not even, dear reader, approach issues of diversity, sex and gender with disinfectant gloves.

This whole country, the pragmatic USA that emerged after World War II with more than 50% of the world's GDP because it did not embrace the narrow strictures of every other country involved, is besotten with precisely the sorts of ideologies they once fought. 

And yet we wonder why we're just another declining superpower...

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Actually, nobody wonders. Everybody thinks they have the explanation, and the explanation is inevitably provided by their ideologies. 

And from where, ultimately, do we get these ideological certainties?

The place you are reading this essay, dear reader. 

The interlinking screen is a force so innovative, so powerful, that we will not fathom what we've unleashed until we see its full might. 

Thank You

 In the wake of Haley's loss I just want to sound a note of gratitude to the people who've stood by Jewish friends and Jews in this era when the political and social pressure to disavow so many things about us is overwhelming. I'm furious at many others I know even as nothing about it surprises me except for who stood by us and who didn't. Some people I thought had our backs turned their backs, and that really hurt. Others whom I thought would never be there turned out there, and that was a joy and a comfort to see. Some of you are the righteous among us who can distinguish between nuances, find the good within the bad, understand that protection of one side does not mean the abandonment of the other, and sometimes do it at serious risk to your careers and social lives. I'm not going to name you because it does nothing good for you to be associated with us in today's climate, but you're there for us, and you will always have the loyalty of Jews even as our loyalty is a demerit against your future prospects.

Thank you and a blessing on you all who've been there for us.

About today's results

 

I endorse Abdul el-Sayed in the Michigan election. I support every Democrat candidate I opposed until now with every fibre. Trump is the immediate threat, and when Hitler invades hell you support the devil. However, real friends realize their Jewish friends are in danger just as any minority always is, and the danger is now bigger than it was yesterday. The world is not just an intersecting network of oppressions you can remove like a shirt. Sometimes the liberation of some comes at the expense of others, and if you're our friends, you'll realize we need protection right now, and you'll pledge to yourselves that you will help to keep us safe before the bad things happen, not after. You won't make a public show of it, but you will resolve to yourselves to change your actions, and you will mean it.

We're being made into sacrificial lambs, and we're as terrified as any other minority is in America. And what's more, we always were. Jews may look prosperous to you, but that prosperity is built on a volcano, now as ever before.

If Israel is considered a rogue state, then it is only a matter of time before part of the Democratic party will consider people suspected of Zionism rogue citizens. And who's suspected of Zionism? Every Jew in America, including the anti-Zionist ones. I have multiple cousins who were already harassed in the street, younger cousins. How long until a relative gets beaten up for being Jewish?

If you're our friends, you'll commit to our protection, not in public, but through action. You will not use Zionist as a slur, you will realize that even if you view Jews and Zionists as different, the overwhelming majority of Jews dont and only Jews have a right to decide what's Jewish and what isnt.

How do you think Israel grew so militant? Do you think Israelis became that way for any reason different than Palestinians? Israel realizes the world hates them. They felt backed into a corner. And when people feel backed into a corner they fight their way out with anything available to them. What's more, Israel would have gotten the weaponry anyway. Israel built the atomic bomb without American help or financial aid, and if there were no American support they probably would have used it. The more anti-Israel you get, the more violent Israel will become. You want to stop the violence? See us. Recognize us. Stop saying the state with 7.75 million Jews has no right to exist. Every Jew in Israel is there because most of their ancestors had nowhere else to go. Every one of them.

You can if you believe it find the government of Israel a disgrace, you can find what the settlers are doing a crime against humanity. If you must, you can even use the g-word, but the moment you cross over into 'a Jewish state should not exist', you have stepped into a place every bit as dark as any place occupied by the Revisionist Zionists who now run the country. Don't think that history will remember you any more kindly than it will remember us.

We like you all. We love you all. We will always be loyal to you. But we don't trust you.

To Dad on Your First Yahrzeit

 I'm trying to write a letter to you on your first yahrzeit. I'm depressed over you, over health reasons and a cancelled trip to New York. The day after I had to call off the trip I got sick again: a cold and a fever over the weekend. I can't stay at home when the kids come over because I don't want them to see me depressed, so I'm at Starbucks, the good one where the staff isn't always fighting. Instead there's a guy right next to me in his fifties who is shouting everything he has to say into the ears of his deaf Israeli mother, along with a not quiet Jamaican caregiver, whom I learned is the 'smartest 88 year old any of them know.' The guy is wearing water proof gym clothes and is in amazing shape: clearly he will be annoying other customers with his conversation for many years to come. I can't move because I have to charge my laptop. They just announced that another person is coming over to say hello. I almost don't want to leave just to see how obnoxious the next person is. 

...Here she is. She has terrible plastic surgery and a shrill voice. There's an African-American gentleman across the Starbucks who is looking at them and looks even more annoyed than I am. ...He just left before he ordered anything. 

Behold, the world you chose to raise us into. A world so unlike you and mom that I'm amazed you didn't shoot yourselves let alone me. Did our families really survive all that just to live in the materialistic, ostentatiously wealthy sort of lifestyle you hated even more than I do? The old lady apparently was a pianist: her family is clearly just loud yuppies with pronounced Baltimore accents who, if they have native intelligence, seem like they never had cause to develop it. 

You always said you wanted to make a sequel to it's a wonderful life called 'It's a Miserable Life', there are days when I don't quite blame you.  

Physical recovery from illness is 40% more likely when the attitude is positive, and I couldn't help but feeling your pessimism toward the end, perhaps even your nihilism. I could only hope it might have bought you another two ro three years, and whenever my time comes, I can only try as best I can to keep the good attitude toward it you always harangued me for not having. 

The forties are different. For the first time, you hear about all sorts of people your age or ten years older dying, dropping dead, getting metastasized cancer, a person in my condition can't help wondering if that will be me before long enough. I'm doing my best to recover, but my best is clearly not good enough yet. I choose to believe things will get better, but some days the lack of evidence is crippling, overwhelming, like a brick wall of limitations.  

...The guy just yelled at his mother's Jamaican caregiver about how she doesn't pick something up every six weeks for his mother in time, something about a hearing aid. Then he slammed down his cellphone. The sister is talking to him about a solution like he's a child. He's glaring at the caregiver like she's an enemy. 

I shudder to think how often that guy was me and I know just how often it was you. It is bad enough when it happens to you, but when you watch what other people become in those moment you feel like a bit of a monster. 

The old lady is sitting furthest away from me, but then I get a look at her, and oh my god, excepting the dyed thinning hair, she looks exactly like Bubbie. It's absolutely uncanny: right down to the same chin, the same bridges, the same facial expresion, the same cheekbones, the same eyes. The face is a little thinner, but it's a dead ringer...

They've finally left, one of them left one of their drinks on the table. Some pissed off guy around 70 in picks up the drink, throws it out as he's shaking his head, and vaguely slams it in the trash. He's now wiping down the tables. Not just the one he's about to sit at but the one next to him: thoroughly. Doubtless he's looking at my table and dying to ask me if he can wipe it down while his superego is yelling at him to yell at me for leaving my kind bar and straw wrappers on the table. 

But after wiping down both tables for three minutes, he's finally sat down with what appears to be his wife. They sit next to each other at the booth while she sips a latte. I like these people more. She smiles at me as though she's sheepish for sitting intimately with her husband. She doesn't have plastic surgery, just a lot of makeup and huge sunglasses. I like these people: she's wearing a baseball cap that says 'book lover', he's wearing the kind of bucket hat Woody Allen always wears: the nerdiest of all hats. They're just sitting there very quietly, mumbling to each other with the long familiarity 50 years companionship brings. He sometimes puts his arm around her when he's not checking his phone. Sitting next to them is a pleasure. 

--------------------------------

It's easy, talking to a ghost, almost easier than talking to you in real life. You finally can't interrupt me or weaponize what I tell you for your own edification, but it's so very different. The endless monologue that inserted itself into my head as many days of my life as you could dominate is no longer there. Supposedly it's my space now, and I intend to take advantage of it. But I worry, oh how I worry. I'm going to take a giant Eurotrip this autumn: not just because I want to treat myself to the trips I've denied myself for fifteen years, but because my body is so farblondget that even if I have many yeras left, I don't know if they will be particularly limber. 

And yet the thought of travelling is in itself scary: inability to eat anything, drink anything, what could happen to me on vacation? I plan on a relatively extensive visit with a friend in Berlin who always smoked a pack a day and drank wine with every meal, another trip to Venice with a couple friends who still do the same: just the second hand smoke will be brutal. 

I also want to go to Europe because I'm not just worried about my own imminent decripitude. 

I could be wrong about Europe: right now Northern Europe is a picture of health so far exceeding our own that there's not even a competition. But Europe has 'ever but slenderly known itself', and the fact remains, as you well knew, Europe cannot sustain itself without US help. They may think they can, but American assistance is all that comes between them and Russian interference, an interference the far right would welcome with open arms. They're doing great: they're doing gangbusters. There is no place to have ever been better to live in than the EU after 2000 until now, but the miracles you can work when you don't have to pay for your own defense beggar belief, but the US government roots for their failure, the Russian government roots for their failure, the Chinese government roots for their failure, and so does Israel. The only people left for reliable alliances are the Middle Powers: Canada, if it holds liberal, Australia, if liberal democracy holds, South Korea, if liberal democracy holds, India, if liberal democracy comes back, Brazil, whose liberal democracy keeps collapsing... The EU can barely get along with itself, does it really expect to get along with unreliable allies any better than it does the US?

If all that goes, so goes all the orchestras, all the theaters, all the galleries, all the free universities, and all the cheap health care if I get really sick over there. 

 And let's not forget, if our country's opinion of Jews is getting lower, it's pretty goddamn low. In a few years, somewhere that seems sympathetic may simply hear I'm Jewish and will trhwo me out. It's very difficult to have a good time in a place where you're not welcome. Regardless of health, I'll bet I have a better time there now than when I'm fifty.

This conflict isn't ending, it probably won't. There might be a temporary halt here and there if Netanyahu goes, (IF...), but the conflict has already been outsourced all over the globe. Every zionist is a villain, and every Jew is suspect of being a Zionist. Even the anti-Zionist Jews will find that out before too long. 

Are half the people I know anti-semites? Well... probably not, but they hold antisemitic notions. I forgive them: they know not what they do; we all hold our prejudices we're quite aware of having, but it doesn't make life easy. I'm sure every minority friend of mine feels exactly the same way, but I'm not sure they're aware we do too. 

You warned me this is what life outside the Jewish bubble's like, my mother warned me that this is ALL life outside the Jewish bubble's like, but people are so much more than their feeelings toward Jews, and part of being Jewish is bearing witness to what the world is: not just that small sliver pertaining to us, but the world entire, as it is, was and will be. If we are meant to be anything at all, we are witnesses, timekeepers, a continuity for the world that connects the now to the beginning of recorded time. 

One of the highlights of the trip will be Berlin: the city of Hegel, Einstein, Fritz Lang, Frederick the Great and Furtwangler (oh god this is getting pretentious...), but most important of all, the Mendelssohns. 

I think you weren't just fascinated by the Mendelssohns, you patterned yourself on them. When I was young and exhibited the musical talent whose promise I never delivered on, you compared yourself to Abraham Mendelssohn and me to Felix, and would repeat his line: "When I was young I was my father's son, and now I am my son's father." 

Horseshit. If anybody was Moses Mendelssohn incarnate it was you. The Jew who associated, but determined not to assimilate with a will of iron. Felix was said to be woken up at 5 every morning to begin his education: an education you instilled into me mightily even as I was a colossal academic failure, but you learned your lesson from me and did not force the same bildung on J..... and E.... 

To you, Judaism and enlightenment were utterly coeval. There was no one without the other. That may be true, but the psychic toll it took on you was intense, and for me it was at times unbearable. I've never felt I fit in among other Jews, and I certainly don't fit in among gentiles. During those years I wanted desperately to break free and live my own life among progressive hipsters, I felt utterly out of place, really as out of place as I do among other Jews. Getting a Jewish education for your kids was so important that it didn't occur to you that I needed a progressive school if I was ever going to find my way through youth. When I was older it always seemed that every great opportunity for a vacation with friends happened on a holiday obligation for which my breaking it would be absolutely unthinkable. When I tried to question the 'religion' about which you would sometimes be withering, you would often get defensive. A number of times you warned me 'if you pick at the thread, the whole thing falls apart!' It's as though in your bones you knew it was bullshit, but you couldn't abide the knowledge of what that meant. I don't quite blame you, life without consolation is terrible. But that meant that in your Judaism, in your life practice, there was no real comfort, no real home. No wonder Moses's children all converted while the Ba'al Shem Tov's followers multiplied by the millions. 

----------------

Well Dad, it's the night after your Yahrzeit was over. Im writing Part 3 in the Hopkins emergency room. Ive been here three hours. For over a month my arm and jaw feel numb, my heart chamber feels like it isn't getting any air, I'm as bloated as Ive ever been and even water isnt going down right. ChatGPT said to go right away. Chatghepetto tells me my nervous system has been in fight or flight for a month and it's likely my heart isnt getting enough oxygen, so I need to go right to the ER. It got bad enough that I finally listened tonight. 

You always warned me that it would happen: stuffing my face with crap for 20 years will do that, and genius that you were, it turned out you were right, but the stress you deliberately caused did not help my efforts to stop. 

I'm sure I didn't have a heart attack. It wasnt that bad, but it might be a cardiac event, and it's just getting worse with every meal. I had six good months once I took the beta blockers but even the safe foods dont work anymore.

Israel is on the Ballot

 It astonishes me every day that Haley is our ultimate bulwark for Israel. Like, right now, two things astonish me. The first is that tomorrow is my father's first yahrzeit. He's been dead for a year. The fact that he dropped dead is devastating, but we all have to pass over at some point. What I could not predict is that my friend, this Michigan WASP of pancake vowels, is fighting a fight that may definitively turn the tide of whether or not the relationship to Israel continues, and consequently...

If we lose the connection to Israel, we lose America. It may not be forever, but it will be for a while, and it will destabilize America to the tune of more casualties than you can count. We either win the Senate or we don't. Most things aren't simple. This is simple.

What do people really think will happen if Sayed wins? Do you really think he would get enough support to win the general?

Bernie voters always say they can put together a working class coalition of right wing voters who would be siphoned over to the left because of their candidates' populism. You might be able to win over working class voters, but do you really think they would ever come over to the left when his main talking point is Israel, Israel, Israel... Most of the voters he's trying to convince are devout Christians, they love Israel more than Jews do! And there's also that unfortunate point about what so many Christians think of... I can't say it, their views on Muslims are beneath contempt, but the world is what it is.

It's astonishing that el-Sayed's done as well as he has. There is clearly a Tea Party like movement on the left. It takes no genius to figure out why: nobody can afford coffee, nobody can afford gas, nobody can afford insurance, nobody can afford beef. Every person middle class and beneath is leaking funds like a sieve. They're justifiably pissed off and they're willing to support a candidate who will articulate their anger even if the target of the candidate's anger has nothing to do with their problems.

But they have to share their quotient of pissed off voters with the pissed off Republicans. Gary Peters has to retire because he's not pissed off enough for anybody's tastes in the age of Trump, and if a Republican wins, he's replaced with a loyal firebreather to Trump, Mike Rogers. Who's going to articulate working class anger better? The firebreather who talks about working class resentments, or the academic who embodies them?

Haley may well lose against Rogers, but she has a far better chance than el-Sayed. The new left has made argument that they can win working class voters: that argument was articulated by Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Jean-Luc Melonchon in France: they both lost in blowouts that so vastly underperformed by how center-left candidates did: and rather than turn the left into pragmatism, it just devastated them and turned millions of them nihilistic rather than more socially committed.

We are so overdue for proper Muslim representation in the Democratic party, but until Israel is no longer their main concern, the entire Democratic party is on opposite sides and there is no stopping a right wing united by a demagogue with dictatorial ambitions even in his dotage.

Israel is now the most volatile issue in America: beyond abortion, beyond trans rights, beyond even resentment of elites! Until this issue calms down, it will break the Democratic party and Republicans will have free reign to let the Israeli right demolish the whole Middle East into a giant truck lot.

Until the Democratic party comes back to the Israeli left, starts advocating again for a two-state solution, even donating to liberal Israeli candidates, there is no Middle East to fight for. You cannot expect to affect the government of a country whose right to exist you deny. How do you think Israel went so right wing? Was it really in isolation? Israel did not used to be a right-wing country, and it arguably wasn't before 2000. A critical mass of Israelis heard exactly the way you hate them and felt backed into a corner. They will fight for their rights and dignity no less than Muslims will, and the more you back them into that corner, the more lethal the fighting gets.

The problem is that issues of Jews have always been on the exact faultline of Western issues. Treatment of Jews was the determinant between which countries went authoritarian in the 1930s, it was the determinant of which countries prospered in the 'long 19th century'. If you dont' like it? Well, get an American majority to take the other side of this issue and see if you have any standard of living in another 30 years...

You may think Zionism and Judaism are separate issues, but face reality finally. More than 1/3rd of the world's Jews live there. Nearly 2/3rds of the world's other Jews support it to the point that they're willing to break friendships over it, and regard anti-Zionist Jews as little different than Jews for Jesus. If you don't understand the Jewish connection to Israel, it's not our problem. We will fight you until we win in every way we know how, and you will either be convinced we're right, you will agree not to bring it up, or we will make your social lives absolutely miserable for you.

This is war, a war not just for the soul of Israel, but a war for the soul of America. All throughout history, country after country is torn apart by ideological polarization that does not recognize the right of the other side to believe what they believe. Until recently, the Democratic party was SO MUCH BETTER than Republicans on this issue. But until this issue is over, there is no adult in the room: it's just two molotov cocktails facing each other while the world burns.

I've asked myself the issue for decades: why do so many people hate Israel so much? I'm always exasperated by Israel in a hundred different ways, never moreso than when I lived there, but your hatred is clearly beyond exasperation. This is the basic denial of the reality Jews face, and the basic denial of Jewish rights. But the reason still didn't quite occur to me. I think I finally have the answer:

Israel hatred is not a war about their policies or any genoc*de or ethnic cleansing that may one day occur, has occurred, or is occurring.

It's not antisemitism, at least not for the vast majority of Americans and Westerners. It's goes far deeper into the human psyche. It's a war on reality. People believe a world is possible without the necessity of defense, without the necessity of soldiery and weaponry, without the necessity of doing what you need to survive. People think we can survive without doing anything necessary for survival. It is the ultimate entitlement and the ultimate refusal to concede that the world is what it is, what it always was, and probably will always be. Historical period after period, they sacrifice Jews to the idea that there's a one-percent chance to make the world into what they think would make it better, but if there's a reason Jews exist at all, it is to show the world that there is no better way. You simply take the world as it is, and as it comes, and figure out practical accommodations to every problem. Ideology is a poison: for Gentile and Jew alike. If they are necessary, you take the amount that's absolutely necessary and combine it with the flexibility of pragmatism: feminism, capitalism, antiracism, queer activism, socialism, militarism, pacifism, pragmatism and Zionism: all necessary, but the moment your 'ism' dictates how you see the world is the moment you become an impediment to the world.

If Haley wins, we may get a Democratic majority. If el-Sayed wins, we won't. Israel is on the ballot tomorrow. America is on the ballot tomorrow. Democracy is on the ballot tomorrow.

For both.

Notes for Columbia/Said story

 

I suppose one should be grateful one is not over there. Being Protestant one is born one station over the Palestinian Muslims who have suffered endlessly: the Ottomans, the Syrians, the British, the French, even the Arabians.

Every student mispronounces  my name: "Sed" "Sayed" "Sayaad" "Sayyeed" "Sah-eed" 

I'm trying not to indulge the time-honored tradition of dating my students, though a few graduates have shown interest. One was male: I've been mistaken for a homosexual since Northfield Mount Hermon. One cannot simply be a dandy in the twentieth century. Instead I'm going with a business school Lebanese girl named Mariam who calls herself "Wall Street Friends of SDS." 

Flank within SDS wants Said to come to a meeting to take a stand to speak for Palestine. Student named Sam Berkowitz who brings up Palestine during discussion of Conrad and sees it as part and parcel of the struggle against the Vietnam War. Said is extremely reluctant to bring it up and asks students to confine the discussion to literature "But literature is political!" the student exclaims. After class Berkowitz stays and says "Professor Sed there are more of us than people think who see what's happening to you." "It's not happening to me, I'm over here." "Somebody needs to give the Palestinian perspective. Everybody thinks these  

Literary Party at the Trillings in honor of Jean-Paul Sartre. 

Hemingway called literary New York a bottle of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. 

Diana invites Edward to give his opinion on the Six Day War: "Lionel speaks of you every day as our brightest new light. He says Edward could be the scholar of the age and people will quote your literary criticism for generations." 

Edward gives a careful answer through the lens of Conrad and Goethe.

Wilson begins questioning him seriously as literature with a slight political bite. 

Edward says one sentence that surprises everyone.

Mary McCarthy: "I had no idea you were such a pan-Arabist." 

D. Trilling: "Surely nationalism is something someone with your bildung would outgrow." 

Said: "Isn't Zionism a form of nationalism?" 

Room goes silent. 

L. Trilling: "I think what Edward is saying is that Palestinians only want the same dignity Jews want. Even if he's misunderstood it slightly." 

D. Trilling: "Please correct me if I'm wrong Edward, but isn't that operating on the oft-disputed assumption that Palestinians are their own people." 

Said: "Well, I'm no expert on orientalism but I would think I know my own people." 

D. Trilling: (laughs) "Edward, please, you're among friends. You can tell us. Did anybody call themselves Palestinian twenty years ago?" 

Said: (pauses) "Not often, I'll concede, but there had to be a name for us. We weren't quite Syrian, not quite Lebanese, not quite Egyptian." 

D. Trilling: "But surely, your people could have been Israeli had they cooperated!" 

Said: (longer pause, micro-expression of annoyance then back to smiling) "I don't think that was possible." 

D. Trilling: "Please don't be angry with me Edward. I just mean that surely there was a moment of possible cooperation before the Mufti allied himself with Hitler." 

Said: "al-Husseini was perfectly willing to cooperate with Ben-Gurion until he realized that the Yishuv meant to resettle Jews as a majority on Palestinian land." 

McCarthy: "Surely you're not telling us that the Mufti was a perfectly reasonable man until he decided to annihilate all the Jews." 

Said: "Not at all, but I believe one has to consider the point of view of the other side however objectionable one finds it." 

Edmund Wilson: "Even when the other point of view is repugnant and murderous?" 

Said: "Especially when the other point of view is repugnant and murderous." 

D. Trilling: "Oh, Edward." 

Said: "Everyone, you must understand that it's just as important for Palestinians to consider the Israeli point of view." 

Wilson: "Why would there even be a question of the Jewish point of view after the Holocaust?" 

Said: "Please, you must understand that Palestinians view Israeli settlers on the land as thieves and sometimes even murderers." 

D. Trilling: (looks incredulous) "I'm... truly... truly shocked to hear you say that. What could Israel possibly have done to make the Palestinians think so badly of them?"

Said: "Diana, I'm sorry, this is a very personal issue for Palestinians. My people were thrown off the land by Israeli soldiers." 

Wilson: "Edward! That was disproven a hundred times." 

Said: "I've heard so many eyewitness testimonies." 

McCarthy: "Were you there?" 

Said: (getting visibly annoyed) "I wasn't." 

McCarthy: "And you trust the testimony of a totalitarian pan-nationalist movement?" 

Said: "The people themselves are not totalitarians." 

Wilson: "Well I've seen them with my own eyes in Israel, and they subscribe to totalitarianism every bit as much as any Soviet." 

Said: "My people are not Nazis!" 

Wilson: "I said Soviet. They may not believe it, but please entertain Edward that they may be coerced by their leadership into giving false testimony." 

Said: "They're not being coerced. How could anyone coerce? No Palestinian leadership is that powerful!" 

D. Trilling: "Wasn't it the dictators of other Arab countries who told Palestinians to leave their towns and they could resettle when the war was won?" 

Jacques Barzun: "Pardon me, Diana, if I may."

D. Trilling: "Of course, Jacques." 

Barzun: "There was credible eyewitness testimony at De'er Yassin that Israeli soldiers threw Palestinians out of their town: a requisition for military necessity. But afterward there was a mass panic that caused thousands of Arabs to leave their homes and head for territory held by Jordan and Egypt." 

Said: "That is not what happened." 

Wilson: "Indeed that is not what happened. Edward, grievance is not fact. You are asking the world to make Palestinians into pure victims at the expense of Jewish suffering."

Said: "I'm just asking people to recognize Palestinian suffering with the attention they pay to Jewish suffering." 

Cynthia Ozick: "As though there is any comparison between what you've endured and what we've endured." 

McCarthy: "What grievances does Edward have? Listen to yourself, Edward. You're not Palestinian, you're pure Andover-Exeter! You're more a gentile than any of us!" 

Said: (sets wineglass down on the table) "My friends, I thank you so much for this invitation, but I do have a Conrad article to finish on deadline." 

Everyone: "NO NO NO! PLEASE STAY! PLEASE STAY!" 

Diana: This is the sort of hazing we all went through Edward. I apologize, truly. This was not meant to be an ambush. There's just so much to talk about on this subject, but I realize now this issue means a great deal to you, probably more than it does to us. We will be mindful of what you think in the future. 

Ozick: "It does mean a great deal to him. Norman told me what you said at the SDS meeting." 

Said: "Norman?" 

Ozick: "Yes, you know Norman Podhoretz I'm sure. He told me you made a speech in which you declared that the struggle of Palestine against Israel is the struggle of Vietnam against the US." 

(silence) 

Ozick: "As it happens, Norman agrees with you, even if his orientation is reciprocal, but he thought we should know." 

L. Trilling (awkwardly turns to Sartre sitting in the corner): Jean-Paul, what do you think of all this?" 

Sartre: "(pauses to gather his thoughts...) It is truly the choice of being in itself, after being becomes irrelevant." 

(everyone nods: Wilson says "Outstanding.")

Sartre: "The facticity is undeniable, but one must be careful that the look is not bad faith."

(general murmurs of approval) 

After the exchange is over and the circle breaks up Lionel whispers to Said: "Edward, please stay to the end of the party. I'd like to speak to you. Please don't mind Diana, she says terrible things when she's intoxicated. She's already gone to the back to lie down." 

-------

later

D. Trilling: "Edward, please try to understand, we're terrified. I know we don't look it but there's not a single Jew who doesn't know someone lost." 

Said: "And that is equally true of my people." 

D. Trilling: "Is it?" 

L. Trilling: "This is not getting us anywhere. Tonight was supposed to be about literature and philosophy. This is where our new breed of student gets us: a weltanschauung where not a single idea is above politics, and it permeates us all. Now one can't even talk Conrad without conversation drifting to Israel and Vietnam." 

Said: "Is it so hard to believe Conrad would provoke that?" 

L. Trilling: "Edward, we need scholars more than ever to speak up for the complexity of the written word and liberal humanism." 

Said: "I was under the impression that's what I've tried to do so far in my whole academic life."  

L. Trilling: "My boy, I thought you were that voice and speaking up as you do so well you could do your small part to lower the temperature of this country's discourse." 

Said: "But Lionel, does the temperature truly need lowering?"  

L. Trilling: "My dear Edward I still think you can be that voice. You're young, you have a lot of the world to see yet and a lot of folly in which you will be both observer and participant as we all are. But it would be a terrible disappointment if we lost you to Fanon and Gramsci." 

I know what this means. Never bring up Palestine again or I don't get tenure. 

end of story

Columbia Is Not a Pretty Campus - beginning (needs new title)

Columbia is not a pretty campus. With the gothic spires of Yale and the Georgian red brick of Harvard, it's as though two Ivy Leagues schools had a child whom they wanted to attend an Ivy League school. Another way of looking at Columbia is that it is a New Yorker's impersonation of an Ivy League: combining what it thinks to be the best parts of each school in order to create something that advertises perfectly that it doesn't belong among its colleagues: like New York intellectuals to the European kinds. 

This is Columbia. Every day I step on the campus and I teach European literature to Jewish students. I then go to meetings among Jewish teachers. Occasionally I'm supervised by Jewish administrators. I publish in journals with Jewish editors. Then I go to dinners where everyone speaks of one topic and only one: Israel. 

They all seem to operate under a de facto assumption I'm one of them until I inform them otherwise: I don't quite know how I give the impression but they always seem all too eager to let me in their club. I remind them my name is Said and they always protest they thought it was Sephardic. I point to my accent and they say that Professor Trilling sounds like a transatlantic Brahmin, why can't a Jew of our generation too? What they're really saying is "you speak pretentiously" because I don't round my r's and aw's. 

Once they realize I'm an Arab, the racism comes later. First class resentment plays its part. They hear the boarding school in me and naturally assume they're dealing with the privilege of an Arab prince. My father was a successful merchant of the upper-middle class, much like most of their fathers. Only their fathers had all of New York to ply their wears. My father had to travel the Middle East so he gave the appearance of affluence he did not possess.

And that's when they hear that I grew up in Jerusalem before my family was thrown out, and the inevitable next sentence is 'You weren't thrown out!'   

Seven Ideas for Tales of Modern Collaboration

- Monologue about the 2001 Durban Conference narrated by Mary Robinson who is trying to use the conference as a rally to mastermind herself into becoming the first ever woman UN Secretary General and justifies everything to herself by what she can do once she gets the job. Tom Lantos is a character, starts by being friendly and diplomatic, promising to support Robinson no matter what, but after the conference starts, Lantos explodes in private and then in public: Robinson views this as a betrayal. Colin Powell is a character passively over the phone, Hanan Ashrawi is a character trying to convince her that the demands of the conference members are sensible. The story ends with an analyst for Qadaffi reviewing her statement like a deposition for the review of Durban conducted by Qadaffi and Ahmedinejad in 2009. 

- One of the Charlap kids is a poor art student in Vienna around 1907 who has affairs with his models. At times he's homeless and lives in 24 hour coffeehouses.  He goes about the coffeehouses, tries to listen to the famous coffeehouse writers pontificate but all he can hear is everybody's hysterical laughter at their witticisms. He goes to the opera and sees Mahler conduct Salome, the next day he gets an invitation to a morning rehearsal of Tristan, it starts with the prelude and Mahler shouts "Too Loud" "...but Herr Mahler..." "TOO LOUD!!" "We haven't even begun Herr Doktor!" "You must play the silence and you are PLAYING IT TOO LOUD!" Everyone comments on what a profound artist Mahler is with this wisdom. At break he meets another painter in the bathroom who calls himself Ah. Ah speaks worshipfully of Mahler and his Jewishness and the way he madly gesticulates at the podium and the aura he conjures for the audience. Ah compares this Charlap's looks to Mahler and John the Baptist in Salome and keeps referencing Charlaps hair like Salome reference's John's. Ah starts reenacting the monologue of Salome when she talks to the head of John the Baptist and tries to kiss the very straight Charlap. Charlap runs out of the bathroom. 

- Edward Said having to schmooze at a Columbia faculty party right after the Six Day War where everybody is Jewish and he's promised no one would talk to him about Israel. A drunk Diana Trilling deliberately provokes him to talk about the Six Day War and yells at him after he says what he says but he realizes if he says what he really thinks his bid for tenure will be over. People all around the room shout him down anyway in ways that have an ambiguous whiff of racism. Lionel later apologizes for his wife's behavior but the apology is, to Said's ears, condescending. Nevertheless he smiles and accepts it. 

- The Robert Jackson prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials, where Raphael Lemkin coins the term genocide. Written from the point of view of a young WASP lawyer, well meaning but with a few antisemitic notions that come out when dealing with the notoriously provocative Lemkin--perhaps thinking to himself that the Holocaust was provoked by men as combative as Lemkin. Jackson is extremely passionate in front of the jury but very practical and jokey in the chambers and is utterly exasperated by Lemkin's zeal. 

- In London or the US, early 90s, two blind German men are put in a nursing home in adjacent rooms and become friends. One was blinded in Dachau, one was blinded while fighting the Americans outside of Dachau. The survivor does not realize that the other man is the camp guard who blinded him, the soldier does not realize he was the one who blinded the camp survivor. The camp survivor has a very fulfilling family life, the camp guard has lived his life alone and terrified. It is only when the survivor tells the story that the guard realizes he was the perpetrator. At night, the Nazi tries to smother the Jew with a pillow. A nurse comes in and sedates them both, the Jew thinks its a dream and the both go on as though nothing happened. 

- Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan are rehearsing All My Sons. It's last months of 1946 when Richard Nixon is taking over HUAC. Narrated by Kazan. Kazan feels incredibly out of place because most of their actors are Jewish, most of their stagehands are Jewish, most of their audiences are Jewish, most of the women they sleep with are Jewish and the women go home with Miller first before they go home with Kazan and Kazan thinks they're all fantasizing about Miller. Everybody is making fun of the anticommunist hysteria but Kazan reads every day about the Greek Civil War and starts getting angry at the hypocrisy of nobody talking about what the Communists are doing over there. He brings up the idea to Miller of a play that denounces the excesses of socialism as well as capitalism, Miller is not angry, just confused 'why would we do that?' Kazan: "we always talk about what's wrong here, what about what's wrong over there?" Miller: "They're not who buy tickets..." Kazan: "I just made a fucking picture about antisemitism! You think Alabama's gonna buy tickets to that? I'm happy to do works standing up for Jews. Why can't we do one for the Greeks?" "I can write circumcision, I can't write pederasty," ...Kazan punches Miller. Miller responds: "I deserved that..." Ends perhaps with Miller going home with a beautiful woman named Norma because she feels sorry for Miller's black eye, and Kazan stuck with a copy of the Herald-Tribune where Greece is the headline, and a copy of the New York Times where Israel is the headline. 

- Abraham Accords: Narrated by Avi Berkowitz, who has to provide the policy framework while watching Jared Kushner shuttle around the world having to assuage the egos of Trump, Netanyahu, MBS, King Abdullah, King Hamad of Bahrain, Steve Mnuchin, Mike Pompeo, David Friedman, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller. Not much more description necessary is there? It ends with MBS or King Abdullah saying "we've finally demonstrated to the world that dictatorships can cooperate just as well as democracies" at which Netanyahu's eyes widen broadly.

Canellakis New York Debut... not that I heard it....

 My plans fell through to go to New York to hear Canellakis's Carnegie debut (unbelievable it's taken this long, no?). She gets raves everywhere, clearly she's got something. If Boston and Andris manage to patch things up (somehow), I don't know where she'll end up, but she's going to be a big star ten years from now.

She's not my type of musician. Everything with her is linear clarity and impact, She's not a particularly great phraser, yet there is a line however compressed. Everything is heard: nothing is atmosphere. I appreciate the lightness and virtuosity, I even appreciate the power and dynamic range, but I find it all a little shallow. Rubato and spontaneity is nowhere. I'm sure that makes things safer for the musicians to execute more cleanly, but inspiring? No.

And yet... the one video where she strikes me as having something like the full measure? Beethoven.

You don't have to be the greatest conductor in the world to create great Beethoven (though it helps), you have to be the most energetic, the fieriest, the least self-conscious, the most galvanizing.

This isn't just galvanizing. This is electric. Suddenly that woodenness you find elsewhere goes elsewhere: whether her style fits Beethoven like a glove or Beethoven brings something out in her, this is magnificent. Canellakis's parents were Juilliard trained musicians, her mother a pianist her father a conductor, and she grew up a violinist. I'm sure she grew up with Beethoven's entire repertoire in her pores in a way she didn't necessarily have the 1900 warhorses, but I have no idea.

The opening is faster than we're used to; fairly close to the metronome, and unlike so many performances, the fast tempo is almost always absolutely secure and they never slow down except two very brief moments (this is so rare, everybody slows down...). But she achieves the impossible that very few do: quickness and dramatic impact, or to put it a different way: lightness and weight simultaneously. Honeck can do it, Gielen can do it, Canellakis can do it.

I don't know how she got them to play for her like this, but man, this is something very special.

Karina Canellakis conducts Beethoven - Symphony No. 3 in E♭ „Eroica“