My Censored Comment at Cross Currents

There is a certain honor in being censored, if honestly earned. It is very easy to be offensive and purposefully antagonize people and then claim the status of martyr when shut down; such actions do not count as being censored. What is meaningful is when one says something rather innocuous that still manages to get under people’s skin, causing them to react. This issue enters the blogosphere usually in the form of comments, which are then taken down by the host blogger because of some offense. As the rabbis knew, you can tell a lot about a person when they are drunk, spend money or get angry. What sort of idea can so enrage a person as to cause a reaction, particularly such an extreme reaction as taking a comment down? Granted, there is a time and place for such things. For example, if anyone were to attempt to use my comment section as a sounding board for White Supremacy, I would, once I stopped finding it funny, erase those comments.

Today I take pride at such a feat, earned at the hand of Yaakov Menken of Cross Currents. Menken posted a short piece titled “Creative Mistranslation,” in which he attacked the Jerusalem Post for its article on Haredi Shabbat protesters. Menken’s objection was that the article translated signs that quoted the biblical phrase “Mot Tamot” as “must die” instead of the more common “surely die.” While, to the best of my understanding, the Post’s translation is technically accurate; I agree that they should have used the more charitable translation. As such there are valid grounds for criticizing them. I wrote a comment that went along a slightly different path:

Considering some of the extremists at work, it is not unreasonable that many of them would take the biblical “he shall surely die” as meaning that someone should kill them. This would still be a step away from actual murder. One has to go from saying “in theory it would be right for me to kill someone” to actually doing it, particularly as this would mean going up against the legal system.
As a parallel example, when I see Muslims waving signs saying “death to the enemies of Islam,” I do not assume that they mean that Allah, in his own good time, will cause them to die. Rather they are making the ideological statement that Muslims have the theological right and even the duty to carry out acts of murder against those perceived as enemies of Islam.

I got a very nice email from Menken, saying:

I have to bounce your comment, because to say there are 'extremists' in Me'ah Shearim who believe all non-Orthodox Jews should die (a la the Muslim model) simply defies the reality. It's not what reciting the posuk (verse) means, and not what they intended. These are people who regularly have non-Orthodox Jews, people they've never met before, as guests in their homes for Shabbos meals.
Yours,
Yaakov Menken

Yes Menken has every right to take my comment down; we live in a free country. In my defense, it should be noted that I do not accuse any Haredim of actually engaging in violence. I specifically noted that what I was talking about was “step away from actual murder.” I also did not compare Haredim to terrorists. I compared relatively peaceful Haredi protesters saying potentially dangerous things with relatively peaceful Muslim protesters saying potentially dangerous things. The issue at hand is not some vague “Muslim” model of kill all irreligious people. What is at stake is what, if any, practical role does the fact that the Torah has the death penalty listed for people who break Shabbos play in our world today, particularly in how we deal with Jews who do not keep Shabbos?

I do not know what those protesters, waving the signs, believe or what sort of conversations they are having behind closed doors. The moment you bring in words like “surely die” into play, it raises certain questions. If someone commits a sin carrying the threat that God will cause that person to die, does it mean that the person deserves to die or that it is a good thing that the person dies? If we assume the affirmative than are we allowed to play some sort of role in bringing this about or in allowing it to happen? Is it alright if someone saw a Shabbos desecrator injured in a car crash and left them to bleed to death on the pavement? If you were in a sealed room with a leading promoter of Shabbos desecration, someone who sins and causes others to sin, and you knew that no one would ever find out, could you put a bullet in that person’s head?

These are not simple issues and intelligent people will likely come down on different sides of this issue. (It should be noted that the Torah portion this coming week in Israel, gives me some pretty solid grounds to pull that trigger.) I hope that the Haredim with those signs are having this conversation. If they are not then they are just throwing around empty words. I have utter contempt for people who simply throw around open ended words without considering what they might mean and without having the moral spine to pay the full consequences for those words. I also fear such words, viewing them as ricocheting bullets. It was not that long ago when the National Religious community was burnt by throwing around a term like “Rodef,” someone whose continued existence is a physical threat to others. One of their own took this word to its literal conclusion and murdered a Prime Minister.

I think Menken’s rather peculiar argument at the end is telling. He argues that because many of the people at the protest gladly bring irreligious Jews into their homes for Shabbos, no one at the protest could have intended physical harm to irreligious Jews. Menken repeats this argument in the comments section when responding to someone else, saying:”I don’t need to do a survey, since I know how many of these protesters open their homes on Shabbos to guests they’ve never met, with or without the ability to even speak the same language.”Clearly Menken believes that this is some sort of trump cad argument and it essentially amounts to: “How dare anyone believe that Haredim are capable of violence, even when they clearly do engage in violence. Haredim invite people into their homes so they must all be kind and decent people.” To state the obvious, there can be people who invite irreligious Jews over for Shabbos and fanatics, who believe in violence, at the same rally and even standing side by side. Furthermore, there is no contradiction in the same person believing, in theory, that Jews who break the Shabbos should be killed and the willingness, in practice, to host an individual non Shabbos observing Jew in one’s home. Considering that Muslims have a reputation for hospitality, that they would never harm, even their enemy, while that person is their guest, this defense is ironic.

I am not arguing that Haredim are violent people; I know too many, who are some of the most wonderful people in the world. Some of these people are even relatives of mine. I am not even arguing that anyone at the protest is guilty of violence. What I am suggesting is that, just as “peaceful” “moderate” Muslims cannot play innocent when they throw around words like “death to the enemies of Islam,” we should not play innocent with such words as “surely die.” Words do mean things and, like bombs, they can explode and kill. We should respect ourselves enough not to hide behind petty apologetics.

The fact that Menken found what I said so troubling as to cause him to erase my comment (and then accuse me of saying things that I did not say) says something about him and what sort of line he has drawn as to what is acceptable. For him, that line is anyone who fails to simply engage in Haredi apologetics and dares to attempt to raise the tough questions. It does not matter if that person moderates what they say and is clearly not out to get the Haredi community as a whole. For Menken there is no such thing, anyone who does raise questions is, by definition, out to get Haredim.

Minuets, Sonatas and Politics in the West Bank: Another Excuse for the New York Times to Show its Anti-Israel Bias

The New York Times has an article about the state of classical music in the Palestinian territories, “Minuets, Sonatas and Politics in the West Bank.” In the article we are put face to face with the struggles of Palestinian children and adults as they strive to transcend the struggles of the world around them through embracing music. For those of you under the impression that the Palestinians have done nothing but produce a generation of jihadists and suicide bombers, “a new generation of Palestinians who have been swept up in a rising tide of interest in Western classical music in the last several years.” Now you may ask who is to blame for the difficult situation these people are in. The New York Times’ evenly balanced response is that both the Israelis and the Palestinians are at fault through their mutual prejudices. The author, Daniel J. Wakin, notes that: “across the border in Israel, which has a mother lode of classical music talent, there is little awareness that Palestinians are pursuing the same artistic tradition. That is perhaps no surprise in a conflict where mutual ignorance is prodigious.”

I have no problem with writing stories about the real life struggles of Palestinians trying to make a better life for themselves. I actually sympathize with them. If I were writing this story it would be about my belief in the power of music to defeat tyranny and put a candle to darkness. This would lead me to asking questions like how much money is being sent by Arab countries to support music programs in the Palestinian territories or why have the Palestinians, or the Arab world for that matter, not produced a world class orchestra like the Israeli Philharmonic. Could it be that a society that values suicide bombers more than musicians has no interest in peace and should not be trusted to make peace?

Thomas Friedman famously observed that no two countries with McDonalds in them have gone to war with each other. The reason for this is that a McDonalds requires the existence of a well developed middle class, a group of people notorious for not wanting to fight wars. I would add a corollary to this principle: any country that does not have a McDonalds should not be trusted in a peace treaty. There are simply too many entrenched powers open to breaking it. Following this line of reasoning, I propose that we add a world class classical orchestra to this list. To build a world class orchestra requires a society that cultivates higher culture. In my mind this is a reason to take a leap of faith with them to make peace. So here is the Benzion Chinn doctrine for signing peace treaties. If you wish to make a treaty with me you better have a Starbucks in your country for me to sign the treaty in. (There are no kosher McDonalds outside of Israel and Starbucks represents the same middle class values to an even greater extreme.) You must also produce a homegrown world class classical orchestra to come to this Starbucks and play for us while we sign.

So here is to world peace over a venti latte to the accompaniment of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

Fake Wikipedia Quote

In the past I have posted on the problems of using Wikipedia within the context of the classroom and in the news media. Now according to an article from the AP, ”Fake Wikipedia Quote Fools Some in the Media,” numerous newspapers managed to fall for a fake quote entered into a the Wikipedia entry of recently deceased composer Maurice Jarre. Three cheers to the author of this wonderful stunt, Shane Fitzgerald, who came up with the admittedly rather touching quote: "One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. … Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear." One of the newspapers to fall for this was the Guardian. So for all those wondering where the Guardian gets its information for its anti Israel material, I think we can now make a pretty good guess.

Mary Beard - The Politics of Reviewing

Today Ohio State was privileged to host Dr. Mary Beard who spoke on some of the practical issues of getting reviewed and writing them, both issues that are of great practical concern to me. I must say that she was an absolute gem both as a speaker and as a human being. Here are my notes for the lecture. As always any mistakes are mine. Dr. Beard has actually posted a piece on her stay in Columbus including a brief overview of this lecture. She even refers to the blog question I asked. So see here for that.

Dr. Beard is a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge in England and one of the pioneering women in the field of classics. She is also the editor of the classics section the Times Literary section (TLS) so she is on both sides of the reviewing fence. She both reviews and gets reviewed.

Any interesting book is bound to get some bad reviews so it should worry a person if they do not get any bad reviews. To start with the actual process, which is the same for any mid-range literary broadsheet, no one looks at a reviewer closer than the author. Most people just glance at the beginning and maybe the end. Reviews have minimal impact on sales. Most of the impact is when you have a reasonably popular book and you get a series of popular reviews. The important thing is to get reviewed, not whether the book gets good reviews or not. Never write a review that you are not prepared to say in front of the author. People do not mind you disagreeing with them as long as you are not nasty. This is not in the financial interests of TLS but never respond to a bad review. It just draws attention to it. If need be, have a friend respond.

How to get a review in TLS? It comes out every week and has a circulation of forty thousand, which translates into a readership of at least one hundred thousand. Rupert Murdoch owns TLS but, as naïve as this sounds, there is no direct interference. Likely it serves him as a useful cover when he gets accused of downgrading things. Books come in boxes and get put down by some wage slave. Most things reviewed get sent by the publishers. It helps if TLS occasionally does a foreign, non-English, book every so often so those they seek out. There are more politics and favoritism than one would like to hear. There are some big names that automatically get reviewed. There is probably no person in the classics who gets that status. It helps if you can match up a book with a reviewer who can write an interesting review of it. You sometimes need some boring reviews, though. In the end, though, you do need to sell. There is bad luck but there is not much that is sinister. One should not send a book to a reviewer whose view on the book you can already predict. Beard once nearly sent a book to a reviewer who had just walked off with the author’s husband. One should try to get a reviewer slightly out of his main area of expertise. She likes to get a mix of views from reviewers. Beard may not agree with Victor Davis Hanson’s politics but he writes a good review. One has a one in forty to a one in fifty chance of getting reviewed for something in the classics. This is rather good considering that for novels it is more like one in two-hundred and fifty.

Reviews are terribly important still. There is something important about critical comment to serve as a gatekeeper as things move out into society. There is much less of a problem with review assassination than with brown-nosing. People are all too willing to be nice than to be critical. There is an issue of democracy. Beard worries about people reviewing books they know little about and it immediately winding up on people’s desktops. Graduate students tend to be highly patronizing. It is important to show that you have engaged the argument. She advises that one avoid adjectives like “simplistic” and “outrageous.” Do not assume that because an author did not mention something they were unaware of it. One should honestly state the argument and no one is going to object if you are critical. Her advice to graduate students who want to start reviewing is that they should start with something very technical that they, in particular, know something about. If it misfires it is less likely to come back to haunt them.

During the Q&A session, I asked Dr. Beard about blogs. As someone in the world of established print, I expected her to have a negative view. It turns out that Beard does not have the anxiety about blogs that she has about other forms of online media. With a blog, you get what you see. People write about what they read last week. Everyone knows that blogs have no quality control. Publishers in England have caught on to this and have started inviting bloggers to parties. There is going to be a creeping institutionalization of blogs. As of now, Beard likes what she sees though she suspects that things are going to change.

Another person asked Dr. Beard how one goes to the next step from being an academic writer, selling a thousand books, to actually becoming popular. As Beard mentioned previously, reviews do not help. What does help is getting on talks shows, into airplane magazines and front tables at book stores. It helps to get a big advance because that forces the publishers to try to sell your work. She strongly advises one to ask about the publicity budget. Finally, unless one hits it very big, one should not bother with an agent.

Dr. Beard’s final words of advice for writing reviews was not to start a review with poetry as it is a bother to set right and not to end with “thus we see.” Beard herself likes to start her reviews with an anecdote. Though admittedly this to can get rather formulaic too.

I asked her, after the lecture, if she was related to the famous early twentieth century American historian Mary Beard. She had a good laugh at that. Apparently her mother named her without ever having heard of Mary Beard. She herself only found out about her namesake as an adult.

So this is what the Catholic League is so Scared of? A Review of the Golden Compass

As regular readers of this blog know, despite my loathing for Philip Pullman, I am a fan of his fantasy series, His Dark Materials. I have been waiting with anticipation for months now for the film adaption of the first part of the trilogy, the Golden Compass. The film, of course, has drawn its share of controversy with the Catholic League attempting to boycott the film. The mainstream media, true to form, is treating the protests from the religious community as attacks on freedom of expression against a work which only “supposedly is atheistic.” Of course, anyone who actually bothered to read the books or to listen to Pullman before he tried to get the books made into films knows that His Dark Materials is not supposedly atheistic, it is straight atheism. Pullman wrote these books as a counter to Narnia and as a way to sell atheism to children. So when religious leaders complain about His Dark Materials they are not making things up or being paranoid. I still believe that a copy of His Dark Materials should be placed in the hands of every boy, girl, and adult in this country, but then again I am strange.
So last night, with a friend from my building, who is also a fan of the books, in tow, I went off to see the Golden Compass. To keep things simple, the film was absolutely dreadful. Not even fighting polar bears could save this film. I found that I could not care less about any of the characters. None of them made any sense. Despite the fact that Tom Stoppard helped write it, the screenplay was a mess. It was a series of tenuously held together events crashing into each other. I admit that the book was quite episodic itself, but you can get away with it much more easily in books than you can on film.
How does one go about taking one of the most original pieces of fantasy literature and reduce it to a pile of clichés? In the books alethiometers are rare and the Magisterium takes an active interest in them. In the movie, I guess feeling that they needed to raise the stakes to make the story more like the common stereotype people have of fantasy, they made Lyra’s alethiometer the last one in existence. In the books, the members of the Magisterium maintain at least some semblance of being human. They are not evil per se but bureaucratic. In making the film someone must have decided that, being that this is fantasy, the Magisterium needed more like traditional fantasy villains. "Fearing any truth that is not their own," they are out to catch Lyra and destroy her alethiometer. I was reminded a bit too strongly of how the Da Vinci Code film made Opus Dei even more over the top than the book did. One is left to wonder why anyone actually bothers to follower an organization that is as evil and incompetent as the Magisterium. For me, the biggest crime against the books was the ending. Those who have read the books know that, at the end of the Golden Compass, Lord Asriel, Lyra’s uncle (really her father), murders her best friend Roger in order to use the energy released by Roger’s dying soul to open a gateway to another world. The movie decided to end before this point. Lyra and Roger are still traveling toward Lord Asriel and we are told that there is a prophecy about Lyra telling how she will decide the coming war.
His Dark Materials were books that purposely defied the traditional fantasy cliché in which the world is divided into neat categories of Good and Evil. Lord Asriel is one of the good guys. Lyra's mother Mrs. Coulter is also, in her own way, on the good side, despite the fact that she also does some pretty horrible things. For the life of me, I cannot understand why the writers of the film could not keep to this. Could it be that Pullman felt that he needed to simplify his atheistic message to make it more digestible to today’s TV addicted youth? And I thought that atheists were the smart ones.

Full Frontal Potter

The media have been all over it, squeezing the story for every bit of shock value it is worth. Oh my God, Daniel Radcliffe, the boy who plays Harry Potter, goes completely naked in a theater production of Equus. Parents are horrified. What should they do with their children.
My thoughts on the matter.
What is Danial Radcliffe doing that is harmful to children? I say this is a wonderful opportunity for parents to talk to their children about making moral choices and how moral choices can be complicated. Here are some starter questions to get the ball rolling. Is Dan doing anything wrong by running around on stage naked, if so what? Does it change things considering the fact that he is doing art and not simply porn? Considering the nature of the acting profession, should actors be expected to live by the same sexual code as other people? I say we all owe Daniel a debt of gratitude. If his actions spark these kinds of conversations then it is worth every stitch of clothing not on his naked body.