Anti Semitism

 The persecution of Jewish people spans a vast historical period, with roots that can be traced back well before 740 BCE. Here's an overview of key events, explanations, and theories:

### **Historical Context and Examples:**

1. **Ancient Times (Before 740 BCE):**

   - **Canaanite Conflicts:** The earliest biblical narratives describe conflicts between the Israelites and Canaanite groups, which can be seen as early forms of persecution or warfare over land and identity.

   - **Exodus from Egypt:** The biblical account of the Exodus describes the Israelites as slaves in Egypt, highlighting one of the earliest recorded instances of Jewish suffering.

2. **740 BCE - 538 BCE:**

   - **Assyrian and Babylonian Exile:** The Kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE, leading to the exile of many Israelites. Later, the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and Solomon's Temple in 586 BCE, exiling Judeans to Babylon, which is remembered as the Babylonian Exile.

3. **Persian Period (538 BCE - 332 BCE):**

   - While the Persians allowed the return of the Jews to Judea and the rebuilding of the Temple, the concept of diaspora began to formalize, setting the stage for future persecutions in areas outside of Judea.

4. **Hellenistic and Roman Periods:**

   - **Seleucid Empire (167 BCE):** The imposition of Hellenistic culture led to the Maccabean Revolt, where Jewish religious practices were outlawed, culminating in the Hanukkah story.

   - **Roman Rule:** 

     - The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE after the First Jewish-Roman War marked a significant event in Jewish persecution. 

     - The Bar Kokhba revolt (132-136 CE) led to further dispersion of Jews with Hadrian's severe restrictions on Jewish practices, including circumcision, and renaming Judea to Syria Palaestina.

5. **Middle Ages:**

   - **Christian Europe:** The rise of Christianity and its adoption as the state religion in the Roman Empire led to a new form of anti-Jewish sentiment. Jews were often blamed for Christ's crucifixion, leading to pogroms, expulsions, and forced conversions:

     - **1096 Crusades:** Jewish communities were massacred by crusaders.

     - **1290 England, 1306 France, 1492 Spain:** Expulsions of Jews from these countries due to religious, economic, and political reasons.

   - **Islamic Territories:** Under Islamic rule, Jews generally had dhimmi status, which offered protection but also came with restrictions and occasionally led to persecution, especially during times of political instability.

6. **Modern Era (19th-20th Century):**

   - **Rise of Racial Antisemitism:** 

     - The Enlightenment and nationalism in Europe led to the transformation of religious anti-Judaism into racial antisemitism, where Jews were seen as a distinct, inferior race rather than just a religious group.

     - **Russian Empire Pogroms:** Late 19th to early 20th century saw violent attacks against Jews.

     - **Nazi Germany and the Holocaust:** The culmination of antisemitic ideology led to the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews during WWII.

### **Explanations and Theories:**

- **Religious Differences:** 

  - Jews were often seen as a theological threat to both Christianity and Islam due to their refusal to convert, maintaining their unique practices, and claiming to be the chosen people of God.

- **Economic Factors:**

  - Jews were often involved in finance and trade, which led to envy and resentment, particularly during economic downturns when they were scapegoated for societal woes.

- **Scapegoating:**

  - Historically, Jews have been blamed for plagues, economic crises, and other societal ills, as seen in the Black Death accusations or after World War I in Germany.

- **Political Expediency:**

  - Rulers sometimes used antisemitism to deflect blame or consolidate power by targeting a minority group, as seen with the Spanish Inquisition or Nazi Germany's policies.

- **Cultural Isolation:**

  - The Jewish practice of maintaining distinct cultural and religious practices made them stand out, fostering suspicion and hostility in societies where integration was not normative.

- **Conspiracy Theories:**

  - Over centuries, myths like the "Blood Libel" or the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" have been propagated, suggesting Jews held secret power or engaged in nefarious activities.

Persecution of Jews has been multifaceted, involving religious, economic, political, and cultural dimensions, often interwoven with each other across different historical epochs and regions. This complex history reflects how societal changes and prejudices have repeatedly targeted Jewish communities.

My Note On Peter Grizzi’s Poem In Defense Of Nothing

 In Defense of Nothing

Peter Gizzi

I guess these trailers lined up in the lot off the highway will do.

I guess that crooked eucalyptus tree also.

I guess this highway will have to do and the cars

     and the people in them on their way.

The present is always coming up to us, surrounding us.

It's hard to imagine atoms, hard to imagine

     hydrogen & oxygen binding, it'll have to do.

This sky with its macular clouds also

     and that electric tower to the left, one line broken free.

Me: 

The speaker describes the quiet weight of things by taking in their ordinariness and flaws yet accepting and appreciating them with a mix of resignation and admiration. So he describes the fragmented landscape: trailers, highways, and a crooked eucalyptus tree. 

The repeated "I guess" is effective understatement that posits a kind of hesitant embrace of flawed ordinariness, imperfect, not completely knowable, but sufficient. 

The speaker evokes the present as an encroaching force and highlights time’s flight, while his mention of incomprehensible atoms and molecular bonds adds—what to call it?—“prosaic mystery” to the ordinary, unknowable amazing undetectable workings forming the ordinary. 

The imagery of “macular clouds”, hinting at eventual blindness, and the “broken electric tower” continues the idea of imperfection, now tainted by decay. Yet isn’t the poem's tone one of quiet acceptance, a defence or nothing, suggesting that a fractured world "will have to do”?

Isn’t there drama in this constrained lyricism? Isn’t there the intimation of the value of a kind of—again what to call it?—existential humility and of reconciling ourselves to limits, imperfections from which paradoxically we can derive value and meaning—again, the defence of nothing.

In the last line the phrase "one line broken free,” has some reverberations. It seems to join rupture or brokenness with freedom. It suggests dysfunction and disconnection. So it  concludes the flaws set out in the preceding imagery. 

Yet, doesn’t “broken free" create an unexpected shift, as if the brokenness leads as well to a release or an escape and, so, new possibilities? 

This concluding tension resolves what the poem is about, the acceptance of flaws and brokenness in the ordinary that match all that in us and yet is the ground for the meaning we can give to our lives, including being the ground for possibilities, possibilities arising from brokenness. 

And so we have the defence of nothing.

The poem’s title defends that which we might dismiss and reject.  So “nothing” is that which we don’t value, as in they’re nothing to us, the merely prosaic. But yet we can elevate them with a reluctant embrace. The poem defends these nothings, asserting their worth which is at one with the little they are to us.

And too, the titular nothing being defended points to a deeper sense of absence, a metaphysical one, the nothingness of all things, our inclination to meaninglessness, to nihilism, populated and suggested by detritus. 

But the world weary speaker is at peace with all that might be thought to objectify that feeling of utter emptiness. 

In his half hearted engagement of it—his repeated “I guess”, in his observation of flaws and brokenness that also reflect what is going on inside him, he too breaks free.

On The Shirelles And Then Roberta Flack Singing “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”

Note to a friend:

Just listened to Roberta sing it. You’re right. It’s a wonderful reading of the song. And I cannot, like you, imagine hearing anyone singing it better. Differently and arguably more or less as well, as maybe the Shirelles do. 

Roberta’s is a mature woman’s reading of the song, haunted, to my ears, by the pain of experience, some world weariness, sadness, knowing matters all too well. Heard that way, every note she sings, every word she sings is just right. Nowhere is it overdramatic or cloying. Her reading conveys something beautifully sad. 

The Shirelles are kids, a teen ager, innocent, inexperienced, asking the same question, but, it’s, I feel, infused with hopefulness and the expectation of the possibility of a positive answer. Roberta, not so much.

It reminds me of two Shakespeare plays that I think about in relation to the theme of love: Romeo and Juliet; and Anthony and Cleopatra. Leaving aside that they’re both by Shakespeare’s lights tragedies, the first is about the intense exuberance of young romantic love; the second is about love as a game, emotion mixed with cynicism and wiles, worldliness, knowing all too well what goes on in the world, a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf quality, but love nonetheless.

Some of that to me informs the way I hear the Shirelles and then Roberta. 

A Short Note On “Close Reading” Being Applicable To Fiction As Well As Lyric Poetry

Note to a friend:

Thanks for your thoughts. 

I'm far from a theorist, but I've always had the intuition that close reading, which I take as of a piece with the New Criticism, is applicable to fiction but differs in its means from its application to poetry. 

I've always thought that there are ways to examine fiction by discussing the techniques inhering in the genre. Fiction being what it is, the analysis will be wider in a sense then that of lyric poems, as for only one example, some characters will be the antithesis of each other or might present variations on a mode of behaviour or personality type that then will have a structural or formal part to play in the work's meaning. 

It would be sterile to talk only in these ways about great books to the exclusion of their sweep, depth and breadth. But as part of the way of coming to full critical terms with them, especially in teaching them and writing about them, I'd argue for the necessity of such close reading. 

That’s not to be put to the exclusion of broader cultural readings of the kind you mention at the foot of your email. 

Now, I may just be trapped in the ways of the New Criticism as that's how literature was taught to me. But in my own way, I've kept thinking about it. 

Lastly, I'm persuaded in this by the way I did my 125  page MA thesis on the novels of Mordecai Richler, even to the occasional point of taking bits of prose and examining them closely with a view to then building them up to fit within what thematically is going on in the book. In fact my essential point was to show how overall formal changes from novel to novel—-say from picaresque comedy to satire to black humour—match the changes in each book's world view.

One Approach To Lyric Poems: A Brief Note To Someone I Know

Here’s one way I think about and often respond to lyric poems. They’re soliloquies, a progression of consciousness, from first word to last. Their poetry in good poems—charged language, imagery, repetition, coupling, symbolism, metaphors, metre, rhythm and the like—works in unison with that progression as form becomes meaning. Simply paraphrasing poems is a start, perhaps a necessary but insufficient condition of understanding a poem, where understanding is a continuum of depth.

Incoherence In Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing?

 I just rewatched Do The Right Thing, 1989,  with my 2024 eyes. It’s provocative. 

From Wikipedia:

“Lee has remarked that only White viewers ask him if Mookie did the right thing; Black viewers do not ask him the question. Lee believes the key point is that Mookie was angry at the wrongful death of Radio Raheem, stating that viewers who question the riot are explicitly failing to see the difference between property damage and the death of a Black man.”

I wonder if the movie goes beyond what Lee intended. It seems he wants the right thing done and, if so, it raises the question, what is that? 

The movie famously ends with the two contrasting quotes:

MLK’s: a preachment against violence to get justice, and for the need for love and understanding; 

and Malcolm X’s, more wiggly: bad people in America hold the power and that violence might be justifiable if the issue is self defence. 

Lee seems to cite MX for the idea that for American Blacks in 1989, violence is self-defence against white racist power, and, therefore, is intelligence rather than violence.  

Isn’t it thematically notable that the movie begins with a lengthy sequence of Rosie Perez dancing aggressively including boxing sequences in the dancing, all to Public Enemy’s Fight The Power?

Wikipedia says:

“”Fight the Power’ is a song by American hip hop group Public Enemy, released as a single in the summer of 1989 on Motown Records. It was conceived at the request of film director Spike Lee, who sought a musical theme for his 1989 film Do the Right Thing.” 

I take all this arguably to suggest that  Lee had in mind the vindication of MX’s quote. 

Why else the opening sequence? 

Why else the thematic incorporation of Public Enemy’s lyrics? 

Why else in what Wikipedia reports Lee said, that Mookie‘s trashing of Sal’s window is an understandable reaction to Radio Raheem’s death? 

The whites in the movie in the persons of Sal and his sons are shown as propertied and hardworking, with Sal and his younger son not prejudiced and his older son, John Tuturro, an out and out racist. The white cop Long is racist, one homicidally so. Ponte, the other cop, not so much.

Lee shows the Blacks in a largely negative light. Many are unemployed. Mookie, the movie’s protagonist, is an irresponsible loser, unable to hold on to a job, living off his much more responsible sister. He’s quite indifferent to his son, and seems only to come around to see his baby son’s mother Rosie Perez when he wants sex, after which he’s gone for a week at a time.

His racist son aside, Sal is a benevolent man, proud of his business and accommodating to his customers so long as they are respectful to him and of business. 

His keeps harkening back to a past when he and his 25 year old business were accepted in the neighbourhood, welcome and trouble free.

So I say Buggin’ Out is wrong to demand Sal hang pictures of Blacks on his Wall of Fame rather than only pictures of Italians. 

He’s wrong to try to organize a boycott of Sal’s on that basis. 

And I say Sal is in his right to insist Radio Raheem turn off his boom box inside the pizzeria, to which Raheem takes unjustified exception. 

 In the result, Buggin’ and Raheem at night insist the Wall of Fame have Blacks. Sal again tells  Raheem to turn his radio off.  Raheem refuses. Buggin' insults Sal and says he’ll  shut his pizzeria down. 

Sal explodes. 

He demolishes Raheem's boombox with a bat. 

Raheem attacks Sal. 

And the violence worsens till the cops come and Long kills Raheem leading to Mookie trashing Sal’s window and sparking a riot that leads to the pizzeria being burnt to the ground. 

I argue that all this dramatizes hopelessness and tragic intractability, both exploding into meaningless destructive violence and loss, with a fair amount of sympathy going to Sal.  

This view of the movie supports MLK’s quote and cuts against MX’s. So why, again, the opening sequence of fighting the power? 

Why does Lee present the issue, at least according to Wiki, as the loss of property as against the death of a black man, when the movie shows them both as terrible occurrences in that intractable hopelessness? They ought not be pitted against each other.

Does not this tension point to incoherence?

Either, it seems to me, Lee’s film either works thematically against itself or Lee has, however explicitly, subtly dramatized the impossibility of doing the right thing.

My 1989 eyes saw the latter of those two possibilities. My 2024 eyes incline to the former of them.