So here, to me, is Elektra

 When asked why he refused to conduct Strauss, Nikolaus Harnoncourt replied that he thought Richard Strauss the most gifted composer since Mozart, but he used his gift for... I forget exactly how he put it but I immediately felt as though I heard what he meant.

Richard Strauss is different than the usual 'overtalents' of music: Mendelssohn, Liszt, Saint-Saens, Rachmaninov, Hindemith, it all came much too easily to them. I distrust those artists who have an overabundance of genius. If you were born with it, you never have to overcome the colossal struggle that gives you something worth saying with your gift. They're awe-inspiring musicians, but they're not great artists. Not for me at least. Mozart and Schubert had that overabundance of genius, but their brief lives were colossally difficult and their heart had something to say beyond their gift for organizing notes.

It came too easily to Richard Strauss too, and yet there was something genuinely different about him that I can never understand. The heady subject matter of his tone poems was like an impersonation of artistic depth rather than Mahler's real thing. How could a man with such a charmed life understand the purpose of artistic depth?

And yet there is a kind of neuroticism in Strauss's music that seems to intuit that this artistic gigantism was imitating his society in an unhealthy way. I have said many times before that I often think that the avant garde works are a kind of pandering pose, contemptuously giving pretentious audiences what they wanted, when what he really wanted was to use his thousands of colors to create music as beautiful as the Mozart and Mendelssohn he loved above all other music. Strauss stayed on the surface of depths And the music for which he was most passionate is the truest key into Strauss's psyche we will ever get. He wanted an untroubled life of beauty, but in order to get beauty, he had to provide the public with philosophy and noise.

Strauss stayed on the surface of depths Mahler freely plunged into: after RS's early romantic poses in Don Juan and Tod und Verklarung, so much of his music is either a kind of postromantic modernism or neoclassical, yet the two seem to combine ever so rarely. To Strauss's credit, he manages to find his own way of creating both modernism and neoclassicism. Mahler too found his way to do both neoclassicism and the avant garde, but he integrated the two modes and many others besides. The generation of Mahler and Strauss venerated Strauss's music and excoriated Mahler's, but that was because Strauss reflected the world back to them his audiences wanted to hear, whereas Mahler reflected all the facets of the world they considered detritus: popular music, tavern music, Jewish music, military music... Strauss is proof enough that nobody had a problem with Mahler's modernism, they had a problem with his populism.

But this is the contradiction of that period's Germany, indeed the contradiction of Europe's entirety. On the one hand, gemutlicher charm, on the other, a taste for violence (and yes, yes, present day America has the same problem). It's the refusal to integrate the schism in Europe's personality that resulted in its great crisis. Mahler showed a way out of the crisis, but Strauss WAS the crisis itself.

Strauss was a second-rate first-rate composer, not the other way around as he said he was. He was great enough to reflect all the problems of his epoch, not great enough to find a way through them.

Below is one of the very few performances that finds a way to integrate those strands of Strauss's personality. Hewing closely to Strauss's metronome markings as perhaps only Carlos Kleiber does besides, the ever underrated William Steinberg finds the Mendelssohn in the light speed whizz of Strauss's millions of details. It is one of the only performances in which Elektra seems to happen in a single breath, a scherzo that, for all its gigantism, passes by with fairy-like lightness. Perhaps that's what Strauss needs, in ultraserious works like Also Sprach and Elektra, to be played with kidding lightness, and with weighty soberiety in playful works like Rosenkavalier and Till Eulenspiegel. Perhaps it's the performances that misrepresent Strauss, and he composed far more psychologically integrated music than I give him credit for.

So here, to me, is Elektra.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4ZHqyp5jxg

Important Books: In the Land of Israel by Amos Oz (part 1 of 2, I promise)

I said I'd write about important books about the region, so let's get to it.

Believe it or not, back in 2006, Amos Oz and I lived in the same town. A deserted desert wasteland called 'Arad.' It was a town that practically symbolized the Israeli dream gone to seed. Even now when the city of Be'er Sheva burgeons--when I lived in Israel it was a shithole--Israel's most prosperous area is still the North where the Mediterranean's climate produces fruit of the vine everywhere.

When the sherut (long distance taxi) driver dropped off in Arad, he pointed out to the desert vista and said to me in Hebrew: "This is Arad. There's nothing here." (Zeh Arad, Yesh Shoom Davar Kahn) Here was a completely planned city like Columbia MD, created to bespeak Ben-Gurion's dream to 'make the desert bloom.' Yet when I got there, one Russian girl turned to me and said three words in English, "Welcome to hell."

Jerusalem and particularly Tel Aviv are cultural centers that can take their place among the world capitals, but Arad was a place almost completely removed from any cultural activity: crawling with Israelis too malcontented to live in more crowded places, the less successful children of the Negev's original residents who never made it North for better opportunities, ex-soldiers haunted by war experience, Soviet emigres and working class Sephardim seduced by the desert's low expenses, senior pulmonary cases needing a desert environ with clean air, hippy artists who painted no pictures but women who posed nude, and low level Russian mafia. It was still Israel - you got fresh pita at six in the morning, a falafel on every street corner, and the bars never closed. But the movie theater still took a smoke break and the mall was closed by dinner time.

Like everywhere in Israel, Arad had its collection of intellectual eccentrics. There was the ex-journalist I once spent a shabbos with, who spent the entire dinner yelling at her British husband. There was the Swiss artist who sold hashish. Then there was the ultra-orthodox mystic who ran Arad's one used bookstore--it was just a kiosk. She didn't speak English but she sold me an English language copy of Don Quixote and gave me an entire speech about how Don Quixote was a reincarnation of Moses.

And yet Arad was known all through the world as the town of Amos Oz, and his wife used to run the artists' program I was there for. We never knew a thing about what Amos or Nilly used to do for the program, but somewhere in this town they were still said to be there, living in the largest house on the town's outskirts with a full window view of the deserted eternity. He was clearly never home when I walked by, and he probably used it as a vacation house to stay in between speaking engagements; but in Arad his presence was everywhere, like a giant whose shadow loomed over every interaction. Residents would speak of him with a kind of awe that such a titan would make home among them. In vain I would go eat at Tokyo Pizza, said to be his favorite place, wondering if I could spot him, get a spot of original wisdom, and maybe get him interested in my first attempts at astonishingly mediocre fiction. My uncle said to just call him up and ask him to coffee. "Israel is just like that." He said. I could only chicken out. I'd still only read a single book of his and I didn't like it much. I could only take it on faith that he was the writer everyone said he was, and what was I going to say? "Duhhh, I hear you write good books..."?

Amos Oz was the intellectual leader of his country. He wasn't its best novelist. Years later, the Israeli novels that most haunt my memory are A.B. Yehoshua's history soaked dreamscapes. And his op-eds were... well... who gives a shit about op-eds?

But then, after I got home, I encountered A Tale of Love and Darkness. Nothing could have prepared me for it. It is one of the greatest books ever written in any country, telling of his mother's suicide and his adventures in pre-Israel Jerusalem, as a farmer/soldier on an early Israel kibbutz, his encounters with all the historical giants of record, but mostly, the many portraits of his family members - types of people who'd be recognized by every Jew, and really every person the world over. Over its six hundred pages, you laugh and cry on nearly every page. It had just been released when I was in Israel, and I was told to drop everything to read it immediately - I didn't. It has since become something resembling the Israeli National Epic.

Five years ago, when Amos Oz died, I wrote an appraisal about him for the Times of Israel. Relatively speaking, it got a lot of attention. Most of the comments on it were somehow deleted. It was at this moment that I realized that the free bloggers were sacrificial lambs to be thrown to the internet cranks - in other words, they thought we were internet cranks too. I tried to use a shul connection with Haaretz to get them to pay me for my writing, and they just offered me another free blog.

There was every kind of crank who answered that article in every kind of tone, and stupidly, I answered them all, telling just about all of them exactly what I thought of them - as is my wont. There was the guy who called Israel's military funding a 'temptation of Mamon.' There was the guy who correctly pointed out something I fumbled in the article, but somehow answered in the tone of a UN Address, beginning every one of his three paragraph with "No, Mr. Tucker," which echoed the famed Arab 'Three No's of Khartoum' after losing the Six Day War - probably intentionally. Best of all was another who said that God commanded Israel to fight all those who oppose our presence in Israel, and that those who would opposed Israel God would 'eliminate.'

It was this moment when I realized that my best option is to write for myself and hope some influential editor would like it in thirty years time.

But we're here to talk about In the Land of Israel. Hopefully that'll be ready tomorrow.

What I Don't Want this Diary to Be

I don't like pundits. Scratch that. I fucking hate them. A thousand trained monkeys at a thousand type writers can be a thousand pundits. All you do is repeat talking points coined by the ether. How did the ether come up with it? Because the points are so fucking obvious that a thousand people thought the same point at the same time.

Public intellectuals is one thing, critics are one thing; their purpose is to challenge, not confirm--but pundits? Oh god they're awful. They do what they do because they have one very limited field of supposed expertise on which they are held as unaccountable as forty year tenured professors. They may very well be fed points by a central party messaging, but even if they weren't, they'd either come up with the same points or points just as obvious from a different ideology.

You know one when you read one/hear an interview with one. They are there to give their reading on a situation, on which they have no real expertise but their talking points. There's no attempt at details to fill in the vagaries of the area, just ideology, just fitting it into the broader narrative of what they think is already true for not just the subject at hand but everything else. So who cares what a person's opinion is when the opinion is one that anybody else can have? We only read them to get validation for what we already think.

What a person thinks is not important. What's important is what everybody thinks. Private affairs are private , and when writing about private matters it's important to empty every crevass of your mind's nuances. In public affairs, what matters is the community, and what's important is to give voice to a whole community of thoughts. Not just the thoughts of two people with diametrically opposed positions, but people of every background, every demographic, every job, every region, every income bracket, every personality, and yes, every identity.

Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll cover a book that does exactly that, because I'm fucking tired of saying what I think. I'm not even sure I think the same things from day to day. The only people fit for punditry are the people whose point of view is so reliable that you can guess what they think about any issue before you read them, and that makes them incredibly boring. The rest of us are dynamic: we evolve, we live, we experience. Every event doesn't just confirm that we were right but newly influences our thinking as we take stock of the ways we might be wrong.

The word for this kind of polyphonic consciousness is 'literature.' Insofar as I wanted to be a writer rather than a musician, I sure as shit didn't want to be an internet commenter nobody reads except a couple friends Stockholmed by me into believing my point of view is insightful. I wanted to be someone whose thoughts are deep enough that my imagination can explore what other people think, not what I do.

I had begun a novel that takes Jewish history from the point of view of exactly that.

Let me rephrase that. Over more than ten years I'd written over 500 pages of a foot-crushing historical fiction, about a hundred of which were useable (I didn't even bother showing many of them to my editor, sorry Nathaniel...).

I've said it before, but all my life I only ever wanted to be one thing: a great artist. Not some 'artiste' with a business card and not just some hipster in a gallery, but the kind of writer/musician who, even if he can't write something that matters to a wide swath of people, at least tries every day with his very soul. A great artist is not someone who succeeds at it (thought that would be amazing...), a great artist always just shows up to work and tries every day to create the best damn thing he can, even if the whole world thinks its shit. The fact that I haven't, with all my opportunities, is a failure of work ethic, a failure of nerve and courage, and a failure of integrity.

So long as I'm doing this shit, I'll never get there. Maybe I was never meant to. Nothing keeps the muse away like 'Importantitis' and the best stuff always happens by a mixture of habit and accident. Maybe stuff like the last seven-and-a-half weeks is the extent of what I can do, but oh how I'd like to do more.

Ten Inconvenient Truths about anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic Hatred

1. The shooting of three Palestinians in Vermont emphasizes the most inconvenient truth about antisemitism in America. We Jews are going to have to come to terms with the fact that even after Pittsburgh, it is still more dangerous to be a Muslim in America than it is to be a Jew. If it were as dangerous, we'd have more than one Jewish murder by now. This leads us to point 2.

2. The statistics say that 60% of all hate crimes in America are committed against Jews. Antisemitism is as bad as it seems, but let's face it, we Jews have easily the most efficient process for reporting the hate crimes that happen to us. We are probably the only demographic for whom a large amount of the hate crimes against us gets reported.

3. No topic gets European conservatives riled up more quickly than the issue of Islamic immigration, and yet according to the Pew Research Center, Muslims will only make up 10% of the European population by 2050.

4. At the moment there are roughly 3.5 million Muslims in the US, and there are twice as many Jews as Muslims, but thanks to birth rates and immigration, there will probably be more Muslims than Jews by 2050. It is naive to expect that their interests will not have political representation in one of the two major party platforms.

5. Whatever the statistics currently demonstrate, global warming can cause an unprecedented wave of immigration to temperate countries from more tropical ones. Every demographic projection would be thrown out the window. This leads us to point 6.

6. Just as in Europe, half of what we currently think of as the 'left' might turn sharply right when they realize that a massive number of immigrants will be religious fundamentalists: be they Islamic or Christian, who passionately advocate to end progressive freedoms.

7. There is no conflict between the values of Islam and the values of democracy, except among Muslims who claim there is. There are countries, like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, where the support for imposing sharia (Koranic) law is over 84%. However, enormous parts of two those countries are ruled by sharia law, so people polled in Afghanistan and Iraq (take note which two...) cannot be counted on to speak their mind - though, it should be noted, in Afghanistan, the figure was 99%, and this was in 2017, before the Taliban took over again - though by 2017 every Afghan knew a Taliban restoration was likely.

In more secular countries that are majority Muslim, like Turkey, the figure stands around 10%. Imposing sharia takes a jihad war in any country, so if you want to impose it on your own country, you almost undoubtedly want to impose it elsewhere too. That probably means that out of all immigrants, roughly 10% would support imposing sharia law on other countries as well: that amounts to about 800,000 Americans and 7.5 million Europeans by 2050, and that number is only by current demographic trends, not counting the chaos that world affairs always brings.

These statistics speak both to how common support for a theocratic dictatorship would be in the Islamic community, and also how little freedom such a dictatorship would afford its citizens.

8. Since October 7th, anti-Islamic incidents seem to have gone up roughly 200%. Since October 7th, antisemitic incidents seem to have gone up 400%. Given the attention these issues currently get, these numbers are probably pretty reliable.

9. One half of Muslims report other Americans expressing solidarity and care for them. Only one-third of Jews do.

10. Antisemitic hatred from leftist champions of Palestine will only radicalize both Jews and the right against Islam. Anti-Islamic hatred will only radicalize Islamic people who otherwise could be of benefit to Western societies - the committed are people of action, after all. Viewing it practically, not sentimentally, then however much rage Israel-Palestine engenders, the only workable solution is to set aside the fury about this issue when dealing with each other's communities; and address together the situation that impacts our lives much more directly than what happens abroad.

Oh g----mnit We Have to Talk about Bernie Sanders

There are no words for how extraordinary this document is. How many times has Bernie Sanders poured cold water on his supporters fire? Twice? Three times? Is this the only time? And it's over the issue of Israel?

If ever there was a remarkable development in American politics, this is it.

I never hated Bernie Sanders's policies: I agreed with well over half of them, and on the issue of gun control he's to my right. What I hate is how he was willing to risk the collapse of American democracy in order to enact them.

Neither Sanders nor his movement should be blamed for Donald Trump, and yet they can.

Whatever any of us thinks of Hilary Clinton, 2016 could have... should have?... been the greatest moment for liberal reform in American history. We'd just had a historically liberal-to-progressive President and were about to have a moderate-to-liberal President with greater skill in building huge coalitions than any President since Lyndon Johnson, who could make deals with the left and bring along a sizeable coalition of the right. Instead? Well, you know instead...

Bernie Sanders was not Donald Trump on the left, but he was the left's 'tea party', and like the Tea Party he's probably enabled the rise of a leftist demagogue to be named later, and just like the origins of the Tea Party got away from its founders with unintended consequences, the Sanders movement got away from his founding goals, as they always would.

It's extraordinary how his movement heard a message completely different from the one Bernie Sanders issued.

His tactics are that of a Marxist who sees no distinction between liberal and conservative, but his policies are just a 1970s international socialist who saw a model in European heads of state like Bruno Kreisky and Willy Brandt. His mindframe exists in the era before 'identity' became the left's primary concern, and it wouldn't surprise me if he privately views issues of racism and sexism as a luxury distraction from the issues of all working people.

The vast majority of followers couldn't care less about this sort of history, which they see as unforgivably behind the times. They speak of the intersections of identity like a revelation: as if everyone before them did not understand issues of racism and sexism, and therefore every era before theirs was asleep to the real concerns.

Sure, the most passionate Bernie supporters were the next-generation socialists, but along with them were the most fervent metoo and Black Lives Matter proponents who take their cues from bellhooks, Audre Lord and Rebecca Solnit (who, ironically, supported Clinton), along with anti-colonialists who take their cue from Frantz Fanon and Edward Said: relegating the young socialist Bernie Bros back to the margins of American discourse with astonishing speed.

So it follows that Israel would be international enemy #1. Not because Israel is that bad, but because when viewed through extreme social theory, Israel appears that bad. It was not founded on colonialism, but there's little doubt that the founding had elements in common with colonialism. The other European colonial projects are pretty much over. Europe has long since ceded their empires, and the tiny Israel is their last bit of microscopic evidence that white colonialism animates the world - regardless of how implicating Jews resembles antisemitic tropes, regardless of how implicating Jews resembles antisemitic tropes, regardless of how Israel was only founded to stop the longest victims of white European crime from being hounded by them anymore, regardless of that Jews are the most reliably left/liberal demographic in the entire world. There's always a new war in Israel, however small, with new news to stoke their fire. , regardless of that Jews are the most reliably left/liberal demographic in the entire world. There's always a new war in Israel, however small, with new news to stoke their fire.

There is very little Saudi-American population who feels a great connection to Saudi Arabia, and most Chinese Americans are trying to put as much distance from the Chinese mainland as the globe permits. But however much less Israel violates human rights than those two human rights beasts, Israel has 2.4% of the American population who never stopped feeling deeply connected with it, and Israel's particular human rights violations are sprawled around every newspaper page and link. It's a completely unique situation in the American demographic spread.

But Bernie Sanders is the son of Jewish immigrants whose views were partially formed by the mid-century Jewish experience. For him, the Holocaust is probably not just another tragedy in the long history of white oppression, it's THE tragedy. Sixty years ago, Bernie Sanders spent ample time in Israel, and I think he views Israel tragically. The early Israel was arguably the truest socialist state on earth, a champion cause for the left, and there is a probably a deep part of of him that cannot let Israel go as a lost cause and believes that with security, Israel may yet become a northern Europe-like state of social democrats, the one which proves that, with socialism as the ultimate aide, Europe can let go of the eras-old antisemitism which he still feels just underneath their surface in his kishkes.

There are few movements more Jewish than socialism. The world's most famous socialist was Jewish, and socialism wouldn't have overtaken Europe without massive quantities of Jews relinquishing their religion for socialism. Without evidence that socialism works particularly for Jews, the best evidence that socialism works for everyone is missing.

For all my venom at Bernie Sanders, there's a lot to admire. I fully recognize that much of my revulsion is visceral and Oedipal, not intellectual. He's an extremely Jewish type of person, I grew up among a dozen Bernie Sanderses, each of whom took a different direction politically and intellectually from both Bernie Sanders and each other. He's what would happen if any of us became famous and listened to, and our temperament is not a recommendable example of how to conduct oneself in public discourse: the dogmatic obsessions, the blindness to unintended consequences, the willingness to endanger good relations for the sake of feeling right, it's all stuff I recognize intimately from well over half a dozen deep intimates.

And especially within myself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/opinion/bernie-sanders-israel-gaza.html

A Letter to my Progressive Jews - rewritten

 

Don't worry, this isn't the first day of the rest of your life. Not everything you believed is no longer true, just a few beliefs to which you'll have to make adjustments, as most generations of progressives do.

We live among the first generation of progressives to not be chastened in a whole century: we saw the state of the world, with Trump and Brexit and economic deregulation and global warming, and it moved us left.

Our parents and grandparents promised we would see the world more conservatively as we got older. That obviously didn't happen. It didn't happen because a world without that moderating urge is just out of living memory.

Living memory now begins with Hitler, when pacifism and communism failed to bring about a better world. When nobody's around to remind us of the circumstances that brought Nazis to power, we fall for all the same temptations that brought us there. Like all opposites in this world, the strength of one strengthens the other. The more you embrace the left, the stronger the right grows.

This does not mean that the correct action is the middle point between every argument. The center of every problem is a dynamic thing: often the solution is quite left of center, occasionally even 'left', because conservatives are usually the establishment that defines the terms of any debate. It does, however, mean that the correct belief can be all over the political map: including sometimes right of center (though, don't worry, it's comparatively rare in Western life, and seldom actually 'right').

But particularly when it comes to military matters, peace without the threat of force is as likely to work as force without the promise of peace.

I don't think you need me to tell you that after you've seen your allies offer the barest hint of sympathy while you're scared out of your wits, you're going to have to make some adjustments to your beliefs: but in the grand scheme, these adjustments are pretty small. What you're perceiving is the realization that most left gentiles will have to come to eventually - the salvageable ones at least: that extremism in the pursuit of virtue is very much a vice.

It's my opinion that there are three basic adjustments you'll have to make.

----------

The first is you'll have to do away with the idea that a just world is possible. On a case by case basis, the world can rise to justice through hard and smart work, but as a whole, the world is indifferent to what's right, and always remains that way.

The last fifty days proved conclusively that there is no future in which racism and antisemitism will be cast aside: antisemitism is just the first of many times the intersectional world will come upon the oceanic limitations of its hypocrisies. Eventually, there will be vast divisions between those who prioritize class with those who prioritize identity, there already are some, and we saw a small ocean of that difference between the average Bernie Sanders supporter and the furthest left Clintonites. Even on the identity side, there will be vast disagreements between those who prioritize fighting racism and those who prioritize fightin sexism and those who prioritize fighting LGBTQ+phobia: and again, there already are. And within each of those divisions, there will be much finer divisions, even granular ones, that cause generations long enmities.

In the Russian Revolution, the Leninist Communists were just one of many many Marxist sects. They arose through a combination of luck, fanaticism, and a ruthless will to power. 999 of 1000 leftists you know are absolutely incapable of such violent acts, but then there's that thousandth, and if the conservative grip on governments tightens so much that they can't help but fall chaotically, don't think the violent ones wouldn't mount a successful attempt to take over in some countries where we currently think their takeover completely unthinkable.

Whether it's intersectionality or Marxism, it's a religion without God. One of my favorite thinkers, the center-liberal Raymond Aron, said in a great book, The Opium of the Intellectuals, that 'intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme." There are solutions that usually work, but there are ALWAYS many exceptions. Another favorite of mine, the leftist George Steiner, turned that line: 'nostalgia for the absolute' into a whole series of lectures in which he outlines how these movements have progressed many times: a substitute religion embraced by an original generation of believers, followed by a series of schisms between sects who believe only their sect speaks for how the central belief was meant to be interpreted.

There have been so many of these secular substitutes over the decades: Marxism and certain socialisms, Freudian psychoanalysis and a hundred types of critical theory, like intersectionality, these are substitutes for Christianity and Islam (and yes, our religion too), and evolved in just the same way. They promise that the truth of the world is animated by an invisible structure, and when it isn't, the movement breaks into thousands of pieces.

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

The second notion in three parts, and paradoxical to the first:

History has very definite lessons, which have to be applied in every era and every country, but they are lessons of "don't"' not "dos."

1. Do not believe progress can't wait, and when progress happens, do not believe the solution is more than temporary. Working for progress can't wait, but the progress itself takes decades, sometimes centuries. The world always resists solutions: it is a stationary force until the moment the proper solution gets applied, and the moment it's applied, the world becomes a dynamic force that grows immune to the solution. Now that history happens so quickly, the world takes less time to grow immune to the solutions we successfully enacted.

2. Do not believe any force in the world can exist without being balanced by its opposite. The more peaceful the world grows, the more progress the world makes, and the more that progress is converted into weaponry, and the more dangerous the world's wars become. The more prosperous a superpower becomes, the more chaotic the world grows when the power falls. Peace is only achieved through the threat of war, and war can only be won when you have a plausible vision of peace.

3. 'History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.' It's usually attributed to Mark Twain, but I doubt anybody knows who really said it, and I'd imagine that, like historical events, whoever said it did so in a slightly different way from how it really happened. On the one hand, history happens randomly. Like rapids on a river, it can flow torrentially, but it never stays in the same place for more than an instant; and yet the topography of a riverbank always stays a riverbank. We study the past because past solutions are usually a key to the future, and past obstacles are a key to what doesn't work: it's not a great key to predict the future with, but it's the only reliable key we have. So FUCKING LEARN HISTORY.

----

The third adjustment, and this is the hardest. I'm sorry to say that we're probably going to have to get rid of the notion that we're 'progressives' and go back to being a boring ass 'liberals.' The difference may seem laughably cosmetic, but the liberal tradition and the progressive tradition have one very large difference: the presence of common sense.

Progressivism, from its late-19th century inception, brought us some of the greatest policies we take for granted: universal public education, economic regulation, organized labor and antitrust laws, laws for workplace safety: this is all progressive policy, and it's fair to believe that the Obama Administration was the beginning of a second progressive age that brought us massive public health care, a worldwide climate deal, and gay marriage. But just as the first progressive age was accompanied by world war and the rise of totalitarian dictatorship, so may this age bring something similar. When you take the safeties off a society, you can't be surprised when any terrible thing becomes possible. This month has born out that progressivism has its deep flaws just as past progressivism did. It would be naive for us to anticipate that this age will not have similar catastrophic events.

Liberalism has one major difference: it doesn't believe in itself strongly enough to pursue anything but what should obvious. Back in the 19th century, liberalism was basically what libertarianism is now, but thanks in part to progressivism, it evolved, and rather than the early 20th century stymied progress of TR and Wilson, it became the stable forward progress of Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower. You know what that entailed, I don't need make a litany. So it's important to have a progressive tradition, it is also important to shed it when it outlives its usefulness.

Conservatives will blow their tops when they read this next sentence, but liberalism's sins are the sins of caution. Liberalism's sins are the sins of believing that in order to achieve victory against worldwide fascism, you have to sometimes stomach dictators as allies, including fascist ones; or the sins of believing that in order to create a better social safety net, you will have to ditch a universal safety net. Yes, they're sins, but they're not quite as mortal sins as the alternatives.

When a public expert tells you that what you see with your eyes is not true, don't believe them. Just as when Republican experts tell you that tax revenues go up when taxes go down, you have to disbelieve progressive experts who tell you that there is an invisible power structure keeping minorities from achieving equally. The power structures keeping them down are extremely visible, and not every white person is complicit in it; and as the most reliably liberal demographic in America, an especial number of Jews aren't complicit.

Don't lie to yourselves, it's possible that the same dark times are coming for us as eventually come for every Jewish era in every country. It may not be yet, it may not be for another few generations, but it's coming, and we'd better be ready.

The writing is on the wall. The Democratic party probably won't be Jewish allies for much longer, and while I can't imagine not voting for them for an infinitely long future, we can no longer expect they will return our loyalty.

Whether center, left, or left-of-center, Jews who bet progress are on our own now. There is only one option left.

Isaiah 42:6 says “I, the LORD, have called you to demonstrate my righteousness. I will take you by the hand and guard you, and I will give you to my people, Israel, as a symbol of my covenant with them. And you will be a light to guide the nations." This is often taken as a testament of Jewish jingoism. I doubt there is much jingoism in the promise that God will guard us, because He so clearly hasn't.

Here's what I choose to believe it means:

That, yet again, we, the Jews, are called to set an example of righteous conduct to a world that doesn't want to see it, if only so we can account for the example we set when it's time to justify ourselves in whatever next world comes.

If other demographics can't let go of their fanaticisms, we have to do it and act with both correct conduct (Derekh Eretz) and help heal the world (Tikkun Olam). It's not jingoism to wonder if Judaism and Liberalism may be the two best ways the world has yet invented to adopt to life's ever changing circumstances, and as always, we are God's lab rats, called as never before to test whether this partnership between two of the world's greatest life philosophies can long endure.

Amen and be well,

Evan

A Letter to my Progressive Jews

 Don't worry, this isn't the first day of the rest of your life. Not everything you believed is no longer true, just a few beliefs to which you'll have to make adjustments, as most generations of progressives do.

We live among the first generation of progressives to not be chastened in a whole century: we saw the state of the world, with Trump and Brexit and economic deregulation and global warming, and it moved us left.

Our parents and grandparents promised we would see the world more conservatively as we got older. That obviously didn't happen. It didn't happen because a world without that conserving urge is just out of living memory.

Living memory now begins with Hitler, when pacifism and communism failed to bring about a better world. When nobody's around to remind us of the circumstances that brought Nazis to power, we fall for all the same temptations that brought us there. Like all opposites in this world, the strength of one strengthens the other. The more you embrace the left, the stronger the right grows.

This does not mean that the correct action is the middle point between every argument. The center is a dynamic thing: often appearing quite left of center because conservatives are usually the establishment that defines the terms of debate. It does, however, mean that the correct belief can be all over the political map: including sometimes right of center (though, don't worry, it's seldom 'right'). Particularly when it comes to military matters, peace without the threat of force is as likely to work as force without the promise of peace.

After you've seen your allies offer you the barest hint of sympathy while you're scared out of your wits, you're going to have to make some adjustments to your beliefs: but in the grand scheme, the adjustments are pretty small. What you're perceiving is the realization that most left gentiles will have to come to eventually - the salvageable ones at least.

There are three basic adjustments you'll have to make.

The first is you'll have to do away with the idea that a just world is possible. On a case by case basis, the world can rise to justice, through hard and smart work at least, but as a whole, the world is indifferent to what's right, and always remains that way.

The last fifty days proved conclusively that there is no future in which racism and antisemitism will be cast aside: antisemitism is just the first of many times the intersectional world will come upon the oceanic limitations of its hypocrisies. Eventually, there will be vast divisions between those who prioritize class with those who prioritize identity, there already are some. Even on the identity side, there will be vast disagreements between those who prioritize anti-racism and those who prioritize anti-sexism and those who prioritize LGBTQ+-phobia, again: there already are. And within each of those divisions, there will be much finer divisions, even granular ones, that cause generations long enmities.

In the Russian Revolution, the Leninist Communists were just one of many many Marxist sects. They arose through a combination of luck, fanaticism, and a ruthless will to power. 999 of 1000 leftists you know are incapable of such violent acts, but then there's that thousandth, and if the conservative grip on governments tightens so much that they can't help but fall chaotically, don't think the violent ones wouldn't mount a successful attempt to take over in some countries where we currently think their takeover unthinkable.

Whether it's intersectionality or Marxism, it's a religion without God. One of my favorite thinkers, Raymond Aron, said in a rather difficult book that 'intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme." There are plots that usually work, but there are ALWAYS many exceptions. Another favorite of mine, George Steiner, turned that line: 'nostalgia for the absolute' into a whole series of lectures in which he outlines how these movements have progressed many times: a substitute religion embraced by an original generation of believers, followed by a series of schisms between sects who believe only their sect speaks for how the central belief was meant to be interpreted. These are substitutes for Christianity and Islam (and yes, our religion too), and evolved in just the same way. They promise that the truth of the world is already known, and when it isn't, they go to pieces.

The second notion in two parts, is paradoxical to the first. History has very definite lessons, which have to be applied in every era and every country, but they are lessons of "don't"' not "dos."

1. Do not believe progress can't wait, and when progress happens, do not believe the solution is more than temporary. The world always resists solutions: it is a stationary force until the moment the proper solution gets applied, and the moment it's applied, the world becomes a dynamic force that grows immune to the solution. Now that history happens so quickly, the world takes less time to grow immune to the solutions you believe in.

2. Do not believe any force in the world can exist without being balanced by its opposite. The more peaceful the world grows, the more progress the world makes, and the more that progress is converted into weaponry, and the more dangerous the world's wars become. The more prosperous a superpower becomes, the more chaotic the world grows when the power falls. Peace is only achieved through the threat of war, and war can only be won when you have a plausible vision of peace.

----

The third adjustment, and this is the hardest. I'm sorry to say that you're going to have to get rid of the notion that you're a 'progressive' and go back to being a boring ass 'liberal.' The difference may seem laughably cosmetic, but the liberal tradition and the progressive tradition have one very large difference: the presence of common sense.

Progressivism, from its late-19th century inception, brought us some of the greatest policies we take for granted; it also brought us some of the worst: eugenics, temperance, compulsive sterilization, and the very particular sins of late 19th century British imperialism. This month has born out that progressivism has its deep flaws just as the past did.

Liberalism has one major difference: it doesn't believe in itself strongly enough to pursue anything but what should obvious. Back in the 19th century, liberalism was basically what libertarianism is now, but thanks in part to progressivism, it evolved, and rather than the early 20th century stymied progress of TR and Wilson, it became the stable progress of Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower. You know what that entailed, I don't need to make a litany.

It's important to have a progressive tradition, it is also important to shed it when it outlives its usefulness.

Conservatives will blow their tops when they read this sentence, but liberalism's sins are the sins of caution. Liberalism's sins are the sins of believing that in order to achieve victory against worldwide fascism, you have to sometimes stomach dictators as allies, including fascist ones; or the sins of believing that in order to create a better social safety net, you will have to ditch a universal safety net.

When a public expert tells you that what you see with your eyes is not true, don't believe them. Just as when Republican experts tell you that tax revenues go up when taxes go down, you have to disbelieve progressive experts who tell you that there is an invisible power structure keeping minorities from achieving equally. The power structures keeping them down are extremely visible, and not every white person is complicit in it; and as the most reliably liberal demographic in America, an especial number of Jews aren't complicit.

Don't lie to yourselves, it's possible that the same dark times are coming for us as eventually come for every Jewish era in every country. It may not be yet, it may not be for another few generations, but it's coming, and we'd better be ready.

The writing is on the wall. The Democratic party probably won't be Jewish allies for much longer, and while I can't imagine not voting for them for an infinitely long future, we can no longer expect they will return our loyalty.

Whether center, left, or left-of-center, Jews who bet progress are on our own now. There is only one option left.

Isaiah 42:6 says “I, the LORD, have called you to demonstrate my righteousness. I will take you by the hand and guard you, and I will give you to my people, Israel, as a symbol of my covenant with them. And you will be a light to guide the nations." This is often taken as a testament of Jewish jingoism. I choose to believe that's not what it means.

What I believe it means is that we, the Jews, yet again, have to set the example. If other demographics can't let go of their fanaticisms, we have to do it and act with both correct conduct (Derekh Eretz) and help heal the world (Tikkun Olam). It's not jingoism to wonder if Judaism and Liberalism may be the two best ways the world has yet invented to adopt to life's ever changing circumstances, and as always, we are God's lab rats, and are called as never before to test whether this partnership between two of the world's greatest life philosophies can long endure.

Amen and be well,

Evan

10 Ironic Lessons from the First Six Weeks

1. Israel's now 16 years under Netanyahu (unconsecutive) isn't just proof that an indefinite presence in the West Bank/Gaza won't work, but that staying in the territories provokes chaos that Israeli Prime Ministers can exploit to stay in power forever. The more Israel seeks to have the preservation of the status quo indefinitely, the more it resembles an authoritarian state for Jews as well as Arabs.

2. The purpose of Hamas's attack was to prevent the normalization of Israel's relations with Saudi Arabia. Israel deserves normalized relations with its neighbors, but normalized relations withSaudi Arabia is normalized relations a power who is, believe it or not, so much more bloody than Israel on its worst day in Gaza. So when Palestine, and even Hamas, objects to Israel having normalized relations with a power like Saudi Arabia, they have a legitimate grievance in a way Palestine's most vocal advocates would find shameful to admit.

3. The current bout of cancellation at American universities makes every side look pretty shameful. One side complains about cancel culture then freely cancels those with beliefs they find objectionable. The other side demands the heads of everyone who makes a statement they find objectionable, then denies cancel culture exists, and now find themselves in danger of getting cancelled. When it comes to Israel, those who invoke the first amendment revoke it, while those who revoke the first amendment invoke it.

4. A million progressive American Jews who've dotted and crossed every woke i and t are having an overnight realization that Jews are the one minority not included in the intersectional revolution. They believed they could Jewish ethics to help heal the world, but the world doesn't want their healing.

5. Leftists are bigots against Jews who vocally support Israel. Rightists are bigots against Jews who don't.

6. Palestine, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority, got at least $40 billion in foreign aid since 1994, at least $10 billion of that ended up in the hands of Hamas's top three officials: Khaled Mashal, Ismail Haniya and Mahmoud al-Zahar. Israel gets roughly $3.8 billion a year when it has a yearly GDP of $500 billion on its own. Yet it's Israel who's thought of as exploiting foreign aid.

7. Saudi Arabia conducts a full-blooded genocide against the East Yemeites. China is probably conducting a genocide against the Uigyurs. Both countries are embedded with the American economy more deeply than Israel. Yet even socialists seem to find those economies too important to go after them with 1% the same venom.

8. Nearly every building in North Gaza has been damaged - whether this is North Gaza or the northern half I don't know, but however deep the moral conundrum, this may result in the most massive foreign aid dump in human history. And yet the chances of the benefits reaching the Gazan people are about the same as they were with all the past foreign aid infusions.

9. The same Likudniks and Republicans who decry the entire Palestinian peoplehood advocate for the same mixture of religion and wealth hoarding that would eventually remake Israel and the US into places just like Palestine.

10. Every country in the first world says they want to help Palestine, yet the moment more than a few Islamic refugees show up on their doorstep, millions in these countries start talking like the Nazis they often think Israelis are.

What did you think war is?

 

What's the goal of the Israeli war? Ostensibly it's to eliminate Hamas. You can get rid of the government, but the idea that you can eliminate it as a political organization is delusional.

Every Israeli but the delusional knows this. The goal is, for better or worse, much more nebulous. Nobody wants to acknowledge the real goal, but everybody knows what it is.

The goal is, as many have said, deterrence. Make sure something of this scale does not happen again for the foreseeable future: from Hamas, from Hezbollah, from Iran, from powers farther afield who, for all we know, may be underwriting them.

Nobody vaguely Left wants to hear the 'd-word' ever again, with its echoes of Cold War paranoia and paradoxical belief in peace through strength, but deterrence worked, and nothing else ever did.

How do you deter them? By making the price so high that no one will think of doing it again. You destroy the capability of making war, and that holds things until they grow back, at which point you have to do it all over again. There is no other way.

People are saying that the collateral damage is much too high and that Israel should be making much more precise hits rather than damage. This IS the precision version. Even the targets properly hit can cost 100 civilian lives when the targets are deliberately placed in civilian areas, but even when the targets aren't hit, you've inflicted enough damage that people realize the price of pursuing this horrible business, not more than that, but enough to make people realize that pursuit of horror results in the horror inflicted back at them.

The war against Hamas isn't a far away deterrence war, this is right next door where if you flinch about human lives, they won't. If you want to see the true damage version of this? Look up what Russians did in Chechnya and Ukraine and Afghanistan, look up what the Serbians did in Srebrenica, look up what the Syrian government did to Aleppo, look up Iraq's 'War of the Cities', look up America's firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo (and let's not forget atomic damage), look up what the WWII Soviets did to the Baltics and Poland, look up what the Japanese did in Nanjing or Manilla or Chiangjiao, look up what the Germans did in Warsaw and Stalingrad and Lidice. Look up 'Operation Tannenberg' or the 'Katyn Massacre.'

Whether you're 'the good guys' or 'the bad guys,' this is what you do when you're in wars of survival. Once you're 'in it', there's no getting out until its over. Nazis commit the bad version of this, but anti-Nazis commit versions of it nearly as bad, because that's the only way you stop Nazis.

This is why, when there's no war, you endure every humiliation to avoid violence and conflict, because once you get there, you have no choice but go all in with no half-measures. You can't domesticate war, and you can't expect any enemy to abide by rules of warfare. You can't pretend there are victors in war. You can't pretend there is honor in war. War is humanity at its most shameful, and we will never, ever be rid of it. In the late-19th century there was a large-scale attempt to rid us of it from the followers of Tolstoy and Marx, and it only clamped the right wing control of governments down farther until those right wing authorities grew so divorced from reality that they made world war over nothing. After World War I, that attempt at pacifism grew into the mainstream, Hitler exploited it, Lenin and Stalin exploited it, Hirohito and Tojo exploited it, and the result was the deadliest conflict in human history. It was as much idealism that lead us there as it was bellicosity, and the more idealism there is, the more nihilist war makers can exploit it.

There is no such thing as peacetime any more than there's such thing as justice or security. There is only deterrence. What we think of as wartime is certainly war for the country fighting for its life, but in asymmetric warfare? It's the conflicts we fight far away so that war, that stinking cataclysm of a thing, doesn't spread around the globe. The country fighting for its life will fight much harder. Hamas will kill children intentionally, and Israel will drop more bombs next door than the US ever does in wars fought far away. That is the way war is fought, and the side that wins is the side more desperate to win. For the country that isn't desperate, they don't have to win, they just have to fight so that countries at peace know better than go to war too.

So many people would read that and ask: how can people view life so cheaply? Look around. When there are 9 1/2 billion people, brought into being at the expense of a million other species, when a billion of them could easily lose their lives in global warming and perhaps another billion from artificial intelligence misapplied, where is the evidence that all lives matter?

War and deterrence, properly fought, is the struggle to make sure that as many lives will matter as can matter. There is no such thing as the good guys or the bad guys in war, but there is probably a side that is slightly more good or bad than the other, and as dirty as it makes you feel, that is the side to which we have to pledge allegiance unless the side that 'isn't great' becomes truly bad.

A certain TV host said that people who say that the Palestinian people are not collectively responsible for Hamas are disgusting.

For fuck's sake, of course they're collectively responsible. Not all Palestinians, certainly not the young, but whichever Palestinians so prized their dignity that they'd vote Hamas are collectively as responsible as Israelis who so prize their honor that they'd vote Likud. And even if that's just a quarter of the population each, that's still an enormous segment of the population. Just as every Islamist, pan-Arab, and hardcore socialist fanatic who excuses Hamas and Hezbollah brought Palestinians to this state, every Israeli right winger brought us the massacres at Be'eri and the Nova Music Festival, and so did every American right winger who excused them. Every Palestinian who voted Hamas knew exactly what they were in 2006 no less than every Netanyahu voter knew who he was by the time he first became Prime Minister in 1996.

It took 125,000 Germans dying in the Battle of Berlin to replace Hitler, mostly civilians, and who can argue that lives weren't ultimately saved through it? If you want to get rid of Hamas, you have to live with the thought of terrible death. And if, over time, Israel grows into a Halachic state - controlled by the ultra-Orthodox and hard-right fanatics who make Netanyahu look sensible, don't think it couldn't be a net good to accept a few ten thousand casualties to get rid of them too.

...and, let's add, if the US becomes one party rule and pursues truly mass war around the globe, not like Iraq or Afghanistan but....

Life is a continual struggle to make life less cheap than it is, but what do you honestly think that struggle entails?