Author: Marc Alan Di Martino

Some background

In the debate over Paul Berman’s Flight, it might be helpful to have the background on the debate, most of which goes back to 2007. Berman’s book is an extension of this debate between European intellectuals (this is a very European debate, by the way) in the English-language German website signandsight.

You can read all the major articles here, beginning with this fiery assertion by Pascal Bruckner:

“Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it is true, does elude current stereotypes of political correctness. As a Somali, she proclaims the superiority of Europe over Africa. As a woman, she is neither wife nor mother. As a Muslim, she openly denounces the backwardness of the Koran. So many flouted cliches make her a true rebel, unlike the sham insurgents our societies produce by the dozen.”

Ouch.

10 books which will poison your mind

That’s just a provocative way of introducing a few summer reading suggestions for the open-minded (but not so open that your brains fall out, we often hear these days). As I’m constantly reading books, and not just blogs, I feel it’s somehow my duty to share these with the outside world. What is more exciting than reading a good book? It’s not unlike falling in love, though you don’t have to fret over fidelity. Read as many as you like; they will never get jealous.

Here are ten books chosen, in no particular fashion, from books I have recently read or dipped into with more than a passing glance.

1. Occidentalism by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit

2. 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists ed. Russell Blackford & Udo Schuklenk

3. Summer for the Gods by Edward J. Larson

4. Past Continuous by Yaakov Shabtai

5. Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History by David Aaronovitch

6. Exuberant Skepticism by Paul Kurtz

7. Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh

8. Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

9. Liberty in the Age of Terror by A.C. Grayling

10. The Flight of the Intellectuals by Paul Berman

Granted, there’s not much fiction on this list. I realize most people instinctively reach for a novel when summer hits. So I’ll add an appendix of some fiction I recommend, recently read or not, from among my perennial favorites.

1. American Pastoral by Philip Roth

2. The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

3. Barney’s Version by Mordechai Richler

4. Fanny Hill by John Cleland

5. Tevye the Dairyman by Sholem Aleichem

Happy reading!

No disagreement here: Garton Ash vs. Hirsi Ali

Another long, eight-part debate, this time between Timothy Garton Ash and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Garton Ash is a master of backpeddling and the “veiled compliment” (you’ll have to watch the whole thing for Hirsi Ali’s rejoinder and Garton Ash’s embarrassing comeback quip). He insists they agree 100% on everything – except what they disagree on. Also, around the end of part six – assuming anyone reading this is as interested as I am in watching the whole thing – Hirsi Ali says something I can’t make out, which is followed by a long bleep-out of Garton Ash’s reply. At the end of part eight, it is explained that this had nothing to do with the debate and was omitted at Garton Ash’s request. Does anyone know what was actually said? If so, please share this tidbit of information in the comments section below.

Tom Bissell on not blogging

Tom Bissell has a post about why he doesn’t blog at Powell’s Books Blog. Tom and I are the same age (both born in 1974), though he is way more successful in his writing career than I have been so far. But he’s not sitting on a magnum opus, I suspect, that will blow the field of modern poetry wide open once it’s published. So, optimistically, by the time we are fifty we should be in the same anthology of “hot middle-aged talent.”

I’m thirty-six, which plants me along a rather odd cultural seam. I’m old enough to remember a world without the Internet (I didn’t send an email until I was in college, and didn’t have a personal email account until I was 27), but young enough not to have known how important it was to pay close attention to the landscape as it changed around me, or how dearly it would affect me. In the late 1990s, when I began publishing, the only writers who had websites or blogs were either tech-savvy or unusually forward thinking. Because I grew up reading magazines and regarded the mere act of publication as promotional effort enough, I simply didn’t understand that the world as it was could be meaningfully altered — much less that it would be. By the time I woke up to this, I worried that a blog or website would seem like a late-to-the-party desperation move. (Yes, at one point in my life, I actually believed that someone other than my mom tracked my machinations that closely.)

My bigger worry, though, was that a blog or website would give me another thing with which to piddle away my time, which I already managed to do quite well by staring at walls. Plus, there was the whole mortifying possibility that I’d start a blog, work hard to fill it up with interesting material, and in effect be forced to attend a daily version of my own funeral in which no one came, no one commented, and no one cared.

(He’s right about that funeral stuff.) Nice work, Tom.

YIVO Encyclopedia online

I just want to mention that the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe is now completely accessible online. This is a landmark project. (Via Normblog.)

The rise of the radical agnostics

Ron Rosenbaum has been getting his share of verbal spanking for the past week from the secret atheist police. They are always out to silence the opposition, even if the opposition is pretty much on their side. Atheists, the new Radical Agnostics say, will settle for nothing less than absolute unbelief. Anything veering from the path of the Truth (there is no God) is suspect and therefore mincemeat for the Atheist Inquisition, especially if you’re guzzling Templeton gelt. It’s only a matter of time before they set up the gallows in your hometown.

What is this radical agnosticism Rosenbaum has proposed, anyway? It is the assertion that WE DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING. It paints science as the pretension to a TOE – or Theory of Everything – and atheists as the henchmen of its church. Agnostics, feeling left out of the NYT bestseller list in the past seven years, want their share now, too.  But how can you be radically undecided? This reminds me of one of those hollow political slogans you see at election time in Italy, Estremo Centro. Get it? Extreme Center. Enough fighting! We have the answer. We’re all just a bunch of ignoramuses. Scientists are no better than theologians. Life is a mystery. We’re all hypocrites. Even me. Even you.

What ever happened to the ancient, respectable art of making an argument and backing it up? Or is that just too fundamentalist for these troubled times?

Embarrassment of riches

Does God need evolution to make a world? Not if you’re a hick-hillbilly creationist like these folks. Yes, that’s “folks” with the s. The new Big Unanswerable Question for the completely uneducated is, “How do black people evolve from white people?” And to think I was going to write a post about Paul Berman’s exciting new book, Flight of the Intellectuals. Goddamit, YouTube!

Ron Rosenbaum’s agnostic howler

Ron Rosenbaum has written a piece for Slate called An Agnostic Manifesto. It’s a complete howler from start to finish. A full-scale rebuttal of Rosenbaum’s argument – and that’s being generous – can be found at Pharyngula.

As anyone who reads this blog already knows (there are some of you, I promise!), I like Ron Rosenbaum. He’s a top-notch investigative reporter who wrote one of the most engrossing books I’ve read in recent memory (Explaining Hitler). That’s why I’m dismayed by his article. He’s going after scientism and calling it atheism. And how confused he is.

His arguments for agnosticism- there aren’t any new ones here at all – are meant to “hold it apart from the certitudes of both theism and atheism.” But atheism is not a certitude. As Sam Harris – that world-famous atheist – never tires of pointing out, the word atheism shouldn’t even need to exist. It only does because religious belief is so widespread. We have no word for non-astrologer. This is worth considering as Rosenbaum makes his way through the muck of his own misunderstanding.

Rosenbaum actually gives the game away early: “Let me make clear that I accept most of the New Atheist’s criticism of religious bad behavior over the centuries, and of theology itself.” This is just after he makes clear that “I still consider myself Jewish in everything but the believing in God part.” So Rosenbaum doesn’t believe in God, agrees substantially with the “new atheists'” arguments agains religion, but for some reason feels the need to distinguish himself. They just aren’t punk enough.

Rosenbaum’s gripe, if I have it correctly, isn’t with atheism at all; it’s with scientism, which he scandalously and sloppily attributes to people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. But this is like confusing meliorism with utopianism. His Big Unanswerable Question for the atheists is “Why is there something rather than nothing?” He apparently is of the opinion that many, if not most, atheists think they have the answer to such a (trick) question. He hasn’t read much of the literature, clearly. Nowhere in my reading have I come across such an inane claim as to know “why” the universe exists, unless you count various scriptural claims. He has it ass backwards.

So obsessed has he grown with what he believes to be his pot of gold that he even posits the Rosenbaum Challenge:

In fact, I challenge any atheist, New or old, to send me their answer to the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I can’t wait for the evasions to pour forth. Or even the evidence that this question ever could be answered by science and logic.

Even if we all agree that we cannot know the answer to such a question, science at least suggests it may be knowable. Rosenbaum accepts the Mystery as eternal. Why? If scientists thought that way we would still be the cowering subjects of priests and shamans, trembling at the wrath of the gods each time we heard thunder crack beyond the hills. The anti-science posture among some intellectuals has really got to go.

Anyway, one could go through the whole article in similar fashion. But, again, why? Perhaps this “agnostic manifesto” gives some of the best reasons to just come out of the closet and go atheist. Rosenbaum’s agnosticism is little more than a caricature of what he pretends to detest (which is just what he says about the atheists). And if he really wanted the scientific-cum-atheist community to take his ranting seriously, he should’ve kept his mouth shut about his Templeton Fellowship.

Willis Barnstone interviewed in Tikkun

Tikkun has an interview with Willis Barnstone in which they discuss Barnstone’s Restored New Testament. I’ve read through a fair share of the RNT (my own interview with Barnstone should be coming out soon in the Journal of Italian Translation), though not all of it – 1500 pages! – and not only is it a strikingly fluid translation in modern English, but it also importantly restores the book to its original Jewish context. You don’t get that, for some reason, reading previous versions.

Money quote:

Basically, in the New Testament only the bad guys are Jews. The hero Jews, meaning Jesus, disciples, and family, come through anachronistically as from a world of later church fathers. In the Old Testament, the Jews are annoyingly called Israelites, children of Israel, Hebrews, anything but Jews (except in Esther), while in the NT the word Jew is used everywhere as a curse. Yet the New Testament was written about Jews, for Jews, and by Jews. Who else were they? Galileans descended from Mars?

The Jewish question in Southern Italy

Haaretz ran a long article back in April on the Jewish revival in Southern Italy. Long story short: once upon a time Italy’s south was brimming with Jewish life, from Roman antiquity straight through the Arab conquest of Sicily, which came to an end with the Christian Inquisition. But the Jews didn’t just disappear. They weren’t murdered off, though there was violence. They were converted to Christianity, their culture was appropriated by the Church (synagogues made into churches, Jewish books used to bind Christian ones, mikves [ritual baths] turned into pigstys, etc…) and all memory of them repressed for centuries.

So in places like Calabria or Sicily, places which almost everyone thinks of as cradles of traditional Catholicism, there are essentially huge numbers of marranos, or secret Jews, similar to what happened in Spain and Portugal during and after the Inquisition. This has led to a number of modern-day conversions back to Judaism, sometimes even of whole communities like that of Trani, in Puglia. Often informal groups sprout up, doing things like getting together on Friday evening  or sitting shiva after a death in the family. Many of them are surprised – but not all – to learn that they in fact are enacting traditional Jewish customs.

I interviewed Rabbi Barbara Aiello, an Italian-American of Calabrian-Sicilian descent, about her activism in the South two years ago. She runs Calabria’s first (legal) synagogue in 500 or so years, celebrating bar- and bat-mitzvahs and Jewish weddings in the Calabrian hills, and offering anyone interested an encounter – perhaps their first – with Judaism. The story is a very interesting one, of course, as is marrano history in general. History is a very amorphous thing at times, and notoriously difficult to pin down, especially when records have been deliberately erased and modified, and physical signs eradicated. The Church officials couldn’t get everything, clearly, and there still exist churches with Hebrew writing in them and Jewish quarters and ritual baths fallen into disrepair all over the south of Italy. In fact, an incredible number of small towns all over in Italy have “ghettos” where Jews once thrived, but haven’t lived for centuries, attesting to their once widespread presence on the peninsula.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the officially Orthodox Italian rabbinate isn’t really interested in Aiello and the other “new” Jews of the South. But I imagine if these small communities continue to grow and proliferate – regardless of whether all these people are or are not Jews in the rabbinic sense – at some point they won’t be able to ignore them any longer. They’ll have to admit that they alone cannot be the arbiters of Jewishness from Venice to Marsala, and will in fact have to open up to the possibility of non-Orthodox forms of Judaism. It will be in their best interests. Otherwise they might be thought of as acting in imitation of the Vatican. And I know they wouldn’t want that.