Author: Marc Alan Di Martino

Ignorance Is No Longer Bliss

Dont be a pill, dude.
Don't be a pill.

Living in Italy, I don’t get the opportunity to watch American television much. I don’t even have Sky, which would enable me to watch hundreds of channels. Until a week or two ago, I lived a quiet life with four–count ’em!–channels: one in black & white, three in color and MTV (which doesn’t count because it’s all reality shows), and most of them owned by Berlusconi. So one might say I was living in the woods.

Now, after a week in the US watching faith channels and Fox News, I’ve finally seen something interesting.Today I watched the entirety of President Obama’s townhall speech on the healthcare (or health insurance) reform bill. I had seen the Obama-with-greasepaint-mustache posters, the swastikas, and I’ve even written about Obama-bashing here. I hadn’t been following this healthcare business closely because, well, I live in Europe. That happens. Anyway, it’s unavoidable now, so when I actually listened to Obama field questions from the public I was surprised at the elegance of his vision.

I know such praise will draw hellfire from the usual quarters, but this was my gut instinct. Here’s how it appears to me, an American who has set foot in this country for the first time since Barack Obama took oath in January, and whose approval rating is supposedly falling like hail fire over Egypt.

Let me briefly preface these observations by stating that I have never taken much of an interest in such debates; nevertheless, I’ve held numerous jobs in the United States, and never have I had a healthcare plan (except for a brief period when I was a member of the auto workers’ union, but don’t ask me how that happened). In Italy I am for the first time a beneficiary of “universal health care.” It is not a dream plan, but I can see a doctor when I need to. What Obama proposed sounds better than what I have in Italy, which is better than what many Americans have in America. Something is wrong in that equation.

Of course, I understand that there is a lot of fine-tuning to be done. Nothing is exactly as it appears, and there may be huge difficulties in funding such a program. And people will probably always fall through the cracks. But let me write what I heard Obama say, and not the pundits:

1. All Americans are entitled to healthcare. No exceptions.

2. If you like your existing healthcare program, you may keep it. The government will not force you to switch to theirs.

3. Wasted money–billions and billions of dollars–will be rerouted in order to finance such a program. These are dollars presently being squandered subsidizing insurance companies, not enriching care for their patients.

4. Everyone will be able to choose the healthcare plan they feel is best. Prices will most likely go down due to a public option.

5. The elderly will not be murdered wholesale by a shadow euthanasia plan.

None of this is highbrow stuff. I did not go and look anything up afterward. Let’s make believe I was an average Joey Bag-o’-Doughnuts in attendance. This is what I would’ve taken away from the encounter.

So the question remains: what is so explosive about all this? Why shouldn’t all Americans have health insurance? It sounds like a dumb question, but I can’t seem to get a straight answer so far.

In the Realm of Hades

Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive by Samuel D. Kassow

Milk can

This book almost defies description. It is as much a biography of the historian Emanuel Ringelblum as it is a history of the Oyneg Shabes, a resistance group in the Warsaw ghetto whose self-appointed mission it was to document life under Nazi occupation. The probability of their endeavor ever seeing the light of day was very small indeed. Only a few people involved in the group—originally composed of dozens of historians, economists, poets, and sociologists—survived the war. The only one who knew where to dig up the buried archives from the rubble of the destroyed ghetto saved himself by jumping from a train bound for Treblinka . Had he, too, perished it is likely that the entire archive would have been lost—as part of it still is—beneath the modern city of Warsaw.

The archive consists of documents of every type: diaries, interviews, historical and sociological studies, poems, photographs, children’s art, candy wrappers. The idea was to leave a record of what the contributors increasingly understood to be a lost civilization—that of Polish Jewry. As the ghetto went from bad to worse, and the first reports of Nazi gassings and mass murder filtered in through underground channels, the Oyneg Shabes (“Sabbath joy” in Yiddish) realized they were responsible for writing their own history, lest it be blotted out forever.

To get the flavor of the context in which these people lived, wrote and died, we might read the words of Stanislaw Rozycki, a Jew who had made his way back to his native Warsaw from Lwow (Lviv). Crossing from the “Aryan” side to the ghetto, he wrote:

“I entered. I crossed the boundary not just of a residential quarter but of a zone of reality, because what I saw and experienced cannot be understood by our reason, thoughts, or imagination…the very act of crossing reminded me of some rite of passage, a ceremonial initiation, a crossing into the realm of Hades.”

It was in this “realm of Hades” that the doomed Jews of Warsaw set down their own record of events. It was a daily struggle against poverty, hunger, displacement, disease, deportation, beatings and murder. The psychological terrorism of the Nazi program underscored all these factors, creating a hand-to-mouth existence with little or no hope for the future. If anyone ever lived “in the moment,” these people did.

Under these conditions the Jewish underground revolted in an armed struggle against the Germans. It was a heroic, last-ditch effort by a people unjustly remembered for passivity in the face of Nazi atrocities. As historian Melvin Konner put it, “It took less time and thought for the Germans to conquer the French nation than to put down the Warsaw ghetto rebellion.” Jewish resistance, Kassow’s book reminds us, had many faces.

Published in The American

Here Comes the Sun

Here comes the sun.
Life is meaningless

“…inevitably, as the Sun switches over to helium fusion, it will become so hot as to boil away Earth’s oceans and smite the life it spawned there. The ten-fold temperature increase required to burn helium will see the hotter sun turn red, and swell in size until it swallows up the planets Mercury and Venus, and melts the surface of the Earth. One hundred million years later, when the sun has reduced more helium to carbon to carbon ash, it will shrug off its outer layers and dispatch them past Pluto. A larger star could resort to carbon burning at this point, but our Sun, a relatively small star by the standards of the universe, will be unable to do so. Instead, it will smolder as an ember, and shed a fading light on the charred cinder where God once walked among men. This dim future, however, lies so far ahead as to allow the descendants of Adam and Noah ample time to find another home.” (Dava Sobel, The Planets, 2005)

This blows the Book of Revelation out of the water. Religious folks have been waiting impatiently for the end of the  world for thousands of years. They have devised the comforts of heaven (and the volcanic cruelties of hell) and the bizarre concept of Judgement Day out of these same fears. Now we have far more reliable methods than prophecy for knowing our past and reading our future. The results are getting clearer, and they are staggering: on the positive side, our planet will endure well beyond our lifetime and that of our next thousand generations (the same cannot be said for our species); on the negative side, our Sun will eventually explode and wipe out every recognizable remnant of our solar system.

If life really is meaningless, why not enjoy it and be nice?

You Don’t Need God To Be Jewish

Are you there, God? Its me, Yehudis.
Are you there, God? It's me, Yehudis.

This is the topic of much debate when Jews decide they don’t believe in God. Can’t Jews be atheists, non-theists or anti-theists? Is there a discriminatory principle according to which Jews cannot not believe in a supernatural power, just like Jews once could not own property or hold certain jobs? Don’t Jews have absolute liberty of thought like everyone else?

Most people would say yes, of course they do, but once they stop believing in God (if they ever did) they thereby stop being Jews. Baloney. Here’s an example of what I’m trying to convey:

I’m on vacation in Virginia, where I went to college. Whenever I’m in the States I watch a good amount of television in order to tap back into the lifeblood of my countrymen and women. My sister’s television has six-hundred channels, and when I get tired of giggling at Fox News and ogling the Food Network I go channel surfing until I hit the Good News stations. Every evening I watch as faith healers knock down their congregations in the spirit of Jesus, heal blindness, exorcise demons and rearrange human bones in living bodies–all on television. Of course, I don’t believe a word of it, and neither should you. Tonight I even heard a preacher tell the devil to leave his congregation’s bank accounts alone. No shit. This is unbelievable stuff–not the least bit supernatural, but still kind of incredible.

There’s even a Jewish life channel (called, imaginatively, Jewish Life). By the above-stated rule that Jews are defined by their belief in a supernatural God (curiously, not the same one that defines Christians and Muslims), one would expect Jewish Life to be full of programs about Hasidism, Kabbalah, Talmud-Torah, or whatever might interest Jewish believers. Well, tonight I jotted down what they broadcasted in the three-or-so hours I was watching while flipping back and forth between the televangelists. Here’s what I saw: a concert clip by Israeli singer Shlomo Artzi, a documentary on Birobidzhan, an endorsement for a Jewish outreach network, and some arbitrary footage of Israeli life: windsurfing on Lake Kinneret, Tel Aviv by night, Masada and people walking, praying and looking generally suspicious in Jerusalem. Add to this last night’s documentary on the Exodus (the ship, not the book), and so far not a measly mention of the man upstairs on an entirely Jewish television network.

I don’t wish to make prophecies. I don’t know if the Jewish people can survive the next three-thousand years if they were all miraculously to go secular. Then again, I don’t know if any of us will survive that long. I doubt such a scenario is possible–though it may be desirable. I am making a case in the here and now for the Jews as a people with a very complex historical identity, of which the Jewish religion plays a significant–but not dominant–role.

You don’t need God to be Jewish.

Another Nail in the Coffin of Religious Orthodoxy

Too hot for a shtreimel today?

Mel Konner, whether you agree with him all the time or not (and you shouldn’t–not because he’s wrong but because you should never agree with anyone all the time), has a provocative and snarky post on some recent Orthodox Jewish criminals, whom he likens to the Sopranos. Now, I hope none of us have illusions that ankle-length black coats and  shtreimels in August automatically make you an ethical bloke, but trafficking in human organs is pretty low. I suppose when evolutionary psychologists claim that all of us have a murderer hidden in our genes they aren’t joking. And neither is Mel.

When you’re a stickler for the fence (no, not that kind of fence) around the Torah, when you shout Shabbes! Shabbes! at every little kid who rides a scooter into your neighborhood, when you yell at your wife that she might miss the candle-lighting time by a second, when even glatt kosher isn’t really good enough—well, haven’t you stored up so many points with the Almighty that you can ignore little mitzvahs like Thou shalt not steal?

Consider the Wonton

I’m on vacation in Virginia, where the pace of life is notoriously slower than in other parts of the developed world. I went to college here, and I didn’t like it then. Now I find it to be quaint and pleasant. The people are good-humored and generous for the most part, and kids and dogs appear to outnumber adults. As Jacob Riis put it over 100 years ago, this is how the other half lives.

The day after I got here I went to the local library to see if they had anything interesting in stock. I asked the librarian how many books one could take out at a time. She answered seventy-five. I made a joke about how I’d have to come back later with a pick-up truck to get them all, and she smiled in her southern way and chalked me up silently as just another northern Jewish weirdo passing through.

I got some good books, though I won’t have time to read them all. Here’s the list: The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow; Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett; The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher; Origins by Neil De Grasse Tyson; Planets by Dava Sobel; and the Norton Anthology of American Jewish Literature. Will I get through the week?

As you can see, there is a science motif running through my choices. Partially, this is because I’m a next-to-know-nothing on the subject. Instead of plunging into a long novel like Anna Karenina, I prefer to play hopscotch with many books on different subjects. With two dogs and an eight year old in the house, I doubt I’ll be able to do any in-depth reading while I’m here.

The Norton Anthology is a great overview of American Jewish writing from the 1700’s up to contemporary authors like Allegra Goodman, who was born seven years before me. So I’m feeling old now.

It also has a few pages of jokes, which I was surprised to find in a “literary” anthology. I guess this is proof that literature has an expanding definition attached to it, something that sourpuss Henry James probably would’ve scoffed at as he did the Yiddish language. “Torture-rooms of the living idiom” was James’s memorable, if misanthropic, description of the Yiddish scene on the Lower East Side about a century ago.

Here’s a decent joke from the volume, which I’d never heard before. Either I haven’t been around the block enough times, or I’m too young, or I began listening too late in life. Enjoy.

A Hebrew teacher stood in front of the classroom and said, “The Jewish people have observed their 5,759th year as a people. Consider the Chinese, for example. They have only observed their 4,692nd year as a people. What does that mean to you?” After a moment of silence, one student raised his hand. “Yes, Dovid,” the teacher said. “Tell us what this means.”

“It means the Jews had to wait 1,067 years for Chinese food.”


Madonna Waxes Kabbalistic

The virgin-now-mother writes in Ynet:

I thought, “What will I teach my child about the important things in life?”

I was practicing Yoga for years and studying Sanskrit. I had read many books by the great Yogi Masters and Indian Avatars. I studied Buddhism and the teachings of the Dali Lama. I studied Taoism and the Art of War.

I read about the Gnostics and the early Christians. I learned a lot and I was very inspired but I still could not connect the dots and find a way to take this knowledge and apply it to my daily life.

I was looking for an answer.

I went to a dinner party in L.A.

Maybe I should be out in L.A., too, at those dinner parties so memorialized in Annie Hall.

American So-Called Jews

The ambiguous title of this post is an example of the brilliant commenting that takes place on the web. The full comment reads:

This article is insane, as 79% of American so called Jews. -Yigal

Here’s the article, if you’re interested. From The Forward:

Alarm bells have been ringing around the neighborhood pretty much nonstop since July 13, when President Obama sat down to talk Middle East policy at the White House with a pack of leaders from a dozen American Jewish organizations.

The meeting was supposed to help buff up Obama’s relationship with the Jewish community, which is bubbling lately with resentment at the president’s aggressive peace-processing. By reaching out to the community’s customary spokesmen, he hoped to build rapport and perhaps recruit a few backers for his policies. Instead he unleashed a whirlwind of attacks against himself, his administration and the Jews who met with him.

The critics accuse Obama of unfairly singling out Israel by demanding a unilateral settlement freeze, without requiring reciprocal Palestinian concessions, and disregarding past American promises to permit some construction. They say he is trying to curry favor with the Arab world, breaking a long-standing presidential tradition of siding automatically with Israel. Some say he is threatening the important legacy of George W. Bush. I didn’t make that one up.

***

If there is a substantive argument in all this, it’s the claim that Israel is being pressured for concessions while the Arab side is not. Obama himself conceded the point at that meeting. He’s now pressing Arab states for gestures to help Israelis get the medicine down. But freezing settlements doesn’t depend on that. Jerusalem is already committed to “freeze all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements).” It’s written in black and white in President Bush’s road map, which Israel signed in 2003 — and which Avigdor Lieberman reaffirmed this past April 1 in his maiden Knesset speech as foreign minister. Israel was able to put off the freeze because the Palestinian Authority wasn’t honoring its commitment to crack down on terrorists. Now the Palestinians are cracking down, and Netanyahu is making up excuses.

As for Obama being the new Roosevelt, we should live so long. FDR, if memory serves, was the guy who defeated Hitler and saved the world, after the Japanese air force convinced congressional Republicans to let us join the war. If Obama has any tricks like that up his sleeve, bring ’em on.

Obama the Machiavellian

Ron Rosenbaum writes:

I think Obama is a true Machiavellian. By abandoning “axis of evil” rhetoric, and by making that Cairo speech, however anodyne it was, and by not jumping in too soon, he turned the Iranian revolution into a pro America phenomenon, rather than allow the fascist mullahs to smear it as a pawn-of-America phenomenon. Not bad for a rookie.

And he made this point two paragraphs after congratulating Slavoj Zizek on an “uncharacteristically sensible and persuasive essay.” It appears Zizek actually has a mind capable of constructing complete, semi-linear thoughts when it feels like it. So why doesn’t he do it more often?

The King of Mishaguss

Massimo Gezzi has an interview with John Ashbery at the Best American Poetry website:

MG: Once you argued that America always seemed like a foreign country to you, adding that living abroad focuses you on where you’re from. Do you still feel that America is like a foreign country? Which are the American poets and writers you most appreciate?

JA: America still seems like a foreign country to me, perhaps now more than ever before. On the other hand, I discovered during ten years I spent in France that I like feeling like a foreigner. Gertrude Stein first pointed out that living in Paris made her more conscious of her American identity. A list of American poets and writers that I appreciate would be very long if I were to include contemporaries, including younger ones whose names would mean nothing to your readers. Of the older ones I would include Whitman, Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Jane Bowles, and also T.S. Eliot and Auden, though we’re not certain which nationality to assign to them.