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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Rowan Berkeley
Published Letters: 176
Neusner is not "ultra-Orthodox", "anti-Zionist", or anything like Neturei Karta and the hassidic groups, if anyone might have considered that possibility. He really is mainstream, with a very respectable university seat and scores of books on Talmud to his credit, that are used in all, I repeat, all talmudic academies.
Anyway, the thing he doesn't say is this : the dynamics of "The Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption" resemble those of Christianity far more closely that they do those of classical Judaism. Death and resurrection is not, after all, a classical Jewish theme. In classical Judaism there is only one bodily resurrection, which is the universal resurrection of the dead on the Day of Judgment. However, in the Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption, as in the religious zionist teaching of Rav Avraham Yitzchak Hakohen Kook, which lies at the basis of the narrowly defined 'religious-zionist' settler movement, the people of Israel collectively constitute their own Moschiach.
Putting these two considerations together, one can say that the people of Israel itself, like the Christian Messiah but unlike anything in any previous form of Judaism, have been ritually sacrificed, have passed through the realm of death and hell, and have been resurrected (the interim being three years rather than three days : the three years between 1945 and 1948).
This hopefully shows how, wherever it came from, it slotted perfectly into the need of the USA for an omnimorphous, materialistic, doctrine of salvation.
you sound like you live a truly enviable life, by my lights - but anyway, given your evident expertise, I would like to bring over from a Gleen Greenwald thread these questions about the Israeli endorsement of Hillary as NY Senator in 2000, which no one there could answer. Here's the wikipedia page:
http://tinyurl.com/5mxlm2
The endorsement as I recall it is oddly elusive web-wise. The context is fairly easy to re-assemble:
(1) there was her deal to pardon the New Court hassids.
(2) there was getting over the Suha Arafat kiss
(3) there was a bizarre, sticky, emotional Jewish campaign of sympathy for her as a humiliated but faithful wife (honestly). Any details on this last (which I recall from the radio) would be esspecially welcome.
since I installed XP Service Pack 3 a few days ago, I haven't been able to change my hosts file!
@ william : sorry, not interested in your feelings. I thought I said that before, actually.
http://tinyurl.com/477me2
don't expect me to keep repeating myself so that you can selectively ignore and thus misrepresent what i am saying.
you still haven't addressed what I said at the URL I gave, which in fact is a copy of what i had already said, here:
http://tinyurl.com/5jronm
post away, I shan't respond again.
I suppose that if there is anything particularly new about what I'm suggesting, apart from just pulling various threads together that taken individually are already well known to specialists, it's something like this : we live in a hallucinated psuedo-reality, determined to a great extent by Steven Spielberg movies. Talking of which, I think that spoof "Night at the Holocaust Museum" trailer was really making fun of Spielberg, not of the Holocaust itself, but it's interesting that despite the extremely clear cineaste references, William's mind, and doubtless the minds of many other people, jumped from the image to the imputed reality, and that is how induced hallucination actually works : film supplants reality in forming moral reactions.
Doubtless if I do so you will either insinuate or assert outright that I am bulldozing the panel with repetition. For the last time, I direct you back to my remarks about the visual, verbal and tactile registers in Lacanian theory, and specifically my assertion that cinematic shock tactics bypass the verbal register and go directly from the visual to the tactile. I cannot get you an URL either large or tiny for this, because I am too busy, and I do not want to overload the panel just to prove a point to you which you are determined to evade. It certainly has nothing to do with 'philosophy,' which is a purely verbal activity unless otherwise stated, and you have at no point stated an interest in, or awareness of the distinctive nature of non-verbal media. Others on here have mentioned Lacanian theory with some air of knowledge, and I would invite them to take a turn at explaining the point to you.
The title of the article was supposed to be funny : it was intended as an ironic reversal of the well-known formula, "Is (so-and-so) good for the Jews?"
Therefore picking up the phrase "the Jews" and running with it is not only a demonstration of wilful ignorance regarding the sociology of Jewish élites, regarding which I suggest you read almost anything by M. J. Rosenberg at Israel Policy Forum, but missing the point of the headline.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
