Alice in Pretentious Artsy Self-Satisfied Modern Bigotry Land (Part II)

(Part I)

I wanted to scream at the audience around me: don't you people understand. This society of nineteenth-century Victorian England was one in which the vast majority of people, except for a narrow elite, lived in a poverty that we cannot even imagine. Do you know what it means to have a society in which starving to death is a real issue? The only thing saving our elites from falling in with the wretched masses is the force of tradition. Anyone who plays with convention is pulling at the spider's web that keeps not only them feed but everyone around them. I would like to see you tolerate such a person. This was particularly true for women, who were limited in their labor prospects and lacked the sort of education that might have allowed them to hold well-paying jobs even if society let them. Can you imagine the position of a widowed mother, living with the trappings of wealth and its expectations, knowing that without her husband to support them there is nothing to stop her and her daughter from sinking into abject poverty? And by poverty we do not mean food stamps, but the slow demise over years due to malnutrition and disease as you work yourself to death. The only thing saving this person is the prospect of a good match. How dare you any of you smirk or feel superior when such a person decides that whether her daughter is in "love" might not be of utter importance.

We now move from the film's pointless introduction to having Alice fall down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. My father often likes to say that comedy is the hardest genre to perform. Comedy is an either/or proposition. Either you are funny or you are not. There is no in-between or partial success. With drama you can always hope to salvage something even if the project fails as a whole. Humor is not a science; it is something that happens sometimes, but cannot be created at will. You can have genuinely talented people who get out there and, through no one's fault, the material just does not work. Without a question, there were some talented people in this production. The team of Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Helen Bonham Carter is nothing to be laughed at. (Just watch Sweeny Todd.) There is no logical reason that this team should not have once again produced something absolutely magical. Except that for some unfathomable reason the material just failed to click.

This failure may have had something to do with the fact that, as Lionel put it, they tried to mix whimsical fantasy with epic fantasy. It was not enough that Alice should explore this strange and downright psychedelic world; the film also had to have her go on a quest to defeat the Red Queen, restore the White Queen to her rightful place and defeat the Jabberwocky. Tolkien just does not go with Carroll. This could have still worked as tongue and cheek. The problem is that of all comedy, I would argue that tongue and cheek is the hardest. For tongue and cheek you have to succeed on two counts. In terms of comedy, you still have to actually be funny and as drama you still need to produce characters who make sense and whom the audience connects with on a deep emotional level. One can always try to cover trash by saying that it is only meant tongue and cheek. Saying that something is meant only tongue and cheek can in no way be an excuse for bad writing. I have so much respect for people like Joss Whedon, J. K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer who use tongue and cheek and make it work. To all those who turn their noses up at their work as popular entertainment that "anyone" could do, I say give it a try.

I could not end this without saying something about what happens back on the top side of the rabbit hole once Alice comes back to her Victorian world. She rejects her upper-class twit of the year and approaches her father's old partner about a really radical business venture, trading with China. Someone needs to offer the writers a history lesson and explain that even our stuffy Victorians were up to trading with China; there was nothing radical in the nineteenth-century about such a prospect. The West even fought several opium wars to open China to western trade. Even people in the Middle Ages were imaginative enough to try trading with China. This was how we got Columbus accidentally discovering America in the first place.

I really wanted to like this movie. I was waiting for it since I heard about it this past summer. I even had a poster of it up as my desktop background. (This proved to be a mistake as some of my little Haredi cousins wanted to use my laptop and started screaming about the not "tznisudic," immodestly dressed, girl in the picture.) However much I respect the people behind this film, it was a failure and not even having it in 3-D could save it.

Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein Goes Sledding

In the recent Jewish Action, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, one of the leading rabbinic authorities for Modern Orthodox Jews, reviews a collection of essays, titled the Eye of the Storm, written by his Haredi colleague Rabbi Aharon Feldman. Rav Lichtenstein attacks Rabbi Feldman, but does so in the sort of sporting gentlemanly fashion that one often despairs into thinking is out of date in this world. Rav Lichtenstein begins by recalling his childhood relationship with the older Rabbi Feldman when they both lived in Baltimore in the early 1940s. While Rav Lichtenstein hints at his disagreements with Rabbi Feldman when it comes to Zionism, feminism and Rabbi Slifkin, his real focus is on Rabbi Feldman's polemical stance. Rabbi Feldman writes out of anger and denies the very possibility that others could reasonably disagree with him. Rather than attempt to reach out to others Rabbi Feldman openly states that he is writing for members of his community, for those already agree with him. Rav Lichtenstein ends with a touching plea for mutual understanding that I think is worth sharing:

Dear Reb Aharon: That pair of juvenile prattling sledders is now well past seventy-five. Each has, besiyat diShmaya [with the help of heaven], in successive contexts, respectively, learned much Torah and has been blessed with the ability and the circumstances to enable reaching out and personally transmitting to others that which we have been endowed. It stands to reason and is, presumably, mandated by joint mission, that our worlds meet and attain mutual fruition. As we both painfully know, however, this occurs rarely.

Must the walls that separate our communities and our institutions soar quite so high, the interposing moat plunge quite so deep? Shall we never sled again?

How Theocratic Rulers Can Sometimes Help the Cause of Freedom

Robert K. Massie, in his biography of Peter the Great of Russia, notes about the Hapsburg emperors of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century were far more interested in being good Catholics and pleasing God then running their kingdom:

At heart, Leopold [I] and after him his two sons, the Emperors Joseph I and Charles VI, did not believe that a chaotic administration was a fundamental defect. The three of them, over almost a century, shared the view that the administration of government was a minor matter, infinitely less important not only for their own souls but for the future of the Hapsburg House than belief in God and support of the Catholic Church. If God was satisfied with them, He would ensure that the House continued and prospered. This, then, was the basis of their political theory and their practice of government. (Peter the Great: His Life and World pg. 222.)

This is not the usual model we associate with this period. This is the age of absolute monarchy and of Louis XIV, where monarchs at the head of centralized States, backed by formal bureaucracies, gained power at the expense of traditional aristocracies. In truth, the Hapsburgs were undergoing the truly critical political evolution of the period, the empowerment of middle-class bureaucrats, just like the rest of Europe. What particularly interests me here is the extent that this does goes contrary to the Whig model where religious piety is supposed to lead to increased autocratic behavior. The monarch rules by grace of God and is not answerable to any mortal being. Limits on monarchial political power are not only bad policy but in fact heresy. In this particular case, the theocratic view of monarchy led to less autocratic views of power. There is something to be said for having a pious king to pray on behalf of the country and leave the running of it to others.

Alice in Pretentious Artsy Self-Satisfied Modern Bigotry Land (Part I)

This afternoon I went on a belated birthday outing with my friend Lionel Spiegel to go see Alice in Wonderland. I should have been more cautious; the last time I went to the movies with him we ended up nearly laughing through Transformers wiping Israel off the map. (Since both of these were my choices, he should probably start questioning my judgment when it comes to going to movies in the future.) A number of loosely assorted observations related to the film.

We went to the Regal movie theater in downtown Silver Spring. The projector crashed right by the opening credits and had to be restarted. This resulted in the movie starting about forty minutes late. To the credit of the movie people, they offered everyone a free movie pass as an apology for the inconvenience. This is the second time I have watched a conventional movie in 3-D and so far I am not impressed. The glasses gave a shaded taint to the screen. Maybe this was a problem with how the film was shot, the theater's lighting or the glasses themselves, but I had a difficult time seeing the screen. I ended up watching a fair amount of the film without the glasses even though the screen obviously was blurry without them. The other problem with the glasses is that they are quite uncomfortable for anything more than a few minutes. When using them I found myself holding them up in front of my face instead of letting them sit on my nose. Maybe it would be a good idea if they produced opera style glasses for 3-D movies. The fact that I did not have a comfortable time may very well have influenced how I took in the actual content of the film.

The film is less an adaption of the Lewis Carroll novel as it is a sequel along the lines of the excellent Robin Williams Hook film, where a grown-up Peter Pan has to go back to Neverland to save his children from Captain Hook. Alice opens with a stereotypical display of stuffy narrow-minded hypocritical Victorians as a grown-up Alice is faced with the prospect of an arranged marriage with a nobleman, worthy of going for the Monty Python upper-class twit of the year award, in the hopes of saving her family fortune. Someone needs to give the writers a history lesson. In the nineteenth century, bankrupt aristocrats were marrying the offspring of traders and industrialists in the hopes of saving their family fortunes, not the other way around. (Tim Burton actually got this right in his earlier wonderful cartoon Corpse Bride, featuring two of the stars of this film. He even was courteous enough, in Corpse Bride, to allow for the existence of a loving arranged marriage.)

I had an idea, which Lionel thinks should be called the Chinn rule. Historical cultures should be given the same treatment as present-day ethnic groups in terms of protection from negative stereotypes. A film in which a young black woman struggles to overcome the violent brutish and ignorant black culture around her, where all the women are on welfare and on drugs and all the men are on drugs and in jail would be quickly tagged as racist. A film about a modern Arab girl that is only about her escaping a brutish culture of arranged marriages and honor killings would also be racist. (Such depictions of Arabs are still the norm, but that is a separate story. On this topic I must say that either this season of 24 is even more horrible in its treatment of Muslims than usual or I am becoming more "tolerant," God help me.) It was okay for Charles Dickens to use comical stereotypes for the nineteenth century. He was part of that time period. This is like blacks and the N-word. Blacks are allowed to use it; if you are not black you have no business saying that word.

Let us be honest, people use negative stereotypes of past cultures for the same disgusting and immoral reason as they go after present day cultures; putting other people down makes people feel better about themselves. Watching stupid intolerant Victorians make fools of themselves makes me, living in the comfort of the twenty-first century, feel intelligent and, more importantly, really tolerant just like being able to cluck my tongue at illiterate black criminals makes me, as a white person, feel civilized and sophisticated. The hypocrisy of prejudicially being able to tag others as intolerant is just sickening. At least blacks are still alive and can knock the living day lights out of bigots (not that I encourage violence) like they deserve. The Victorians, aside from sending the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, have no one, but historians like me to defend them.


(To be continued …)

Atheists Want You to Exchange Your Bible for Something More Sophisticated (Like Porn)

Ashley Tedesco over at Jewcy has an article about the students of the Atheist Agenda over at the University of Texas. They offered students the chance to exchange their Bibles for pornography, an exchange of "porn for porn." I would see this as a good example of atheists simply being out to destroy. It is easy to attack organized religion (I do it all the time) and the Bible can certainly be interpreted for the worst as so many of its detractors and supposed "defenders" do. The question becomes can you offer something better. Offer students the chance to give up reading the Bible and try sinking their teeth into Newton's Principia or even Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time.

If there is one thing worthwhile about Richard Dawkins it is when he talks about his love of science and how contemplating the mysteries of the universe gives meaning and order to his life. Personally, I find, that when he does this, he almost sounds religious (in the good sense).

See Ma! Studying Medieval and Early Modern Apocalyptic Movements Can be Useful

In the introduction to Messianic Revolution, David Katz and Richard Popkin explain that they were inspired to write the book from witnessing the Waco fiasco and how government negotiators did not understand apocalyptic reasoning even to the extent of failing to understand how the book of Isaiah might be relevant to the situation. One of the negotiators even thought that the "Seven Seals" were animals:

We know now that this failure to attend to the precise meaning of Koresh's references, compounded with the failure to understand the background of a group like the Branch Davidians, created very serious breaks in the chain of reasoning that might have led to an informed decision. The psychologists who advised the FBI concluded that Koresh was paranoid and that there was no point in trying to negotiate with him; the authorities eventually adopted a strategy of "stress escalation" that involved not only cutting off electricity to and training floodlights on the compound's buildings but also the use of other tactics including playing tapes of loud music, Tibetan chants, pleas from family members, and the sounds of animals being killed. Doomsday and death were part of the Branch Davidians' messianic plan, and when they died in the fire at Waco, they believed they were merely playing their parts in a divine script which they clearly understood.

Our sense was that we had seen this all before. On one level, the events at Waco reminded us of another siege by the forces of order, four and a half centuries earlier, at Munster in northern Germany. There, too, a group of religious radicals set up what they considered a divine community of Anabaptists behind a protective wall and held off the authorities for sixteen months, until June 25, 1535, when the gates of Munster mysteriously opened from within, allowing the capture of the Prince-Bishop Franz von Waldeck, who massacred nearly everyone inside. But even more importantly, we believe that much o modern religious radicalism can clearly be traced to earlier groups and their theologies, that it is impossible to understand sects like the Branch Davidians without this historical perspective. (pg. xi)

My mother can rest assured; there is something useful to do with the study of medieval and early modern apocalyptic movements (besides for going into the business for myself, bad health plan and all). I can go to work for the government (assuming I survive the background and sock drawer checks) as an expert in radical religious apocalyptic movements. I think that there is message in my work. Apocalyptics, even those sitting in caves, do inhabit the same physical word that we do and are part of the same political dynamics. (This becomes painfully obvious when apocalyptic visions crash planes into building and attempt to manufacture nuclear weapons.) It is important that we treat them as such.

1800 Rabbis Will Practice Their Magic Judaism for You

Here is another ad for Haredi magic Judaism idolatry.

I notice that the Haredi rabbis listed in the ad are not actually part of the event. They were just asked to attend. Which means that they have either said no or they have not gotten back to the fine people at Ateret Shlomo (which is another way of saying no).

I should send out spam emails:

Read Izgad! The blog of Rabbi Dovid Landesman, Rabbi Shalom Carmy and Malcolm Gladwell. 

(At least one of them actually reads this blog and every one of them would be welcome to offer a guest post if they so wished.)

You have to give Kupat Ha'ir credit. They at least go through the trouble to get Haredi rabbis to offer blurbs in favor of their idolatry.   

Tour Europe and Practice Idolatry at Over 400 Graves

What particularly caught my attention was the passage: "In places that are not visited as frequently you can often have your prayers 'heard' more readily in the merit of the Tzadikim that are not visited as often." I am glad that they put the word "heard" in quotes. I would hope that they meant that God does not literally hear prayers since God is not a physical being with ears or even affected by sound. Most probably they meant to merely acknowledge that God is aware of everything and does not hear things more readily or less readily.

None of this gets this company off the hook for idolatry. Usually one can cover for praying at graves by saying that the righteous person is incidental just that if you are going to pray you might as well go to a place associated with a righteous person. One can even argue that there is a special merit in praying in a place where many other people are gathering (hence why we have synagogues in the first place) or even to pray in a place where many people have prayed at in the past. In this case, we are choosing to pray at a place specifically where there have not been many prayers said. This trip only makes sense if we accept the theological premise that God wishes for human beings to honor deceased righteous people by praying at their graves to such an extent that he counts it as a special merit to those who find out of the way graves of righteous people to pray by. Hence the focus is not God. At best, God only comes in as the Santa Claus at the end of the tunnel with his bag of goodies. This is about venerating dead rabbis as not just righteous people to be imitated, but spiritual forces in their own right. This is idolatry.

As a historian and a religious Jew, I strongly support touring Eastern Europe and tending the graves of Jewish leaders. These are historic landmarks for the Jewish people and just as the Bible records the locations where the Israelites traveled in the desert so too should we record the locations of past Jewish communities and the important figures that lived and were buried there. I would make a special effort to seek out those graves that have been forgotten. I would even make the effort to pray and recite Psalms there. God forbid out of any belief that they have power or any desire to make use of that power to "manipulate" God, but simply to include them within Jewish memory.

The Politics of Jewish Messianism (My Proposed Dissertation Thesis)

Gershom Scholem famously distinguished between two types of Messianism, a restorative Messianism that sought to reestablish the biblical Jewish State and a utopian apocalyptic Messianism that sought the end of the physical political world as we know it. (See David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History pg. 72.) Scholem and most students of Jewish Messianism have tended to focus on the latter type of Messianism. I would like to deal with the former kind.

On the surface, Jewish Messianism has very little to do with politics. In fact, it can be seen as a counter politics. Politics deals with earthly power as it relates to a State of this world. Messianism is usually seen as a rejection of politics and the earthly political State. Instead, it looks for an end to earthly politics through the imposition of a supernatural divine State. From this perspective, there is a vast gulf between political thinkers, such as Machiavelli and John Locke, and political revolutionaries, such as George Washington and Maximilien Robespierre, on the one hand, and messianic thinkers, such as Joachim of Fiore, and messianic claimants, such as John of Leiden, on the other. In my work, I seek to argue that, in fact, that the apocalyptic world of Messianism may not be so far removed from the realm of earthly politics. Whatever various messianic movements may have thought of the politics of their day, it cannot be denied that messianic movements by definition interact with worldly political authorities, make political claims and are thus themselves political movements of this world. 

For anyone not wedded to the Whig narrative of bifurcating the “superstitious” Middle Ages and “rational” Enlightenment and ignorant of the past few decades of scholarship, this should not be surprising or controversial. There is a well-established literature linking in various ways the “religious” messianic and apocalyptic movements of the Medieval and early modern periods with the supposedly “secular” revolutionary political movements of the modern period. To give some examples, Norman Cohn, back in the 1950s, in his Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, sought to portray movements as the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Taborites and the Anabaptist Munster revolt as the forerunners of modern absolutist movements such as Communism and Fascism. Similarly, though working in the opposite direction, Jacob Talmon, in his Origins of Totalitarian Democracy and Political Messianism: the Romantic Phase, sought to connect modern totalitarian movements, particularly those of the Rousseauan tradition, with earlier religious apocalyptic movements. David S. Katz and the late Richard H. Popkin, in Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium, set forth the evolution of medieval Joachimite apocalyptic tradition into the modern apocalyptic movements of today.

I seek to bring elements of all of these works together and apply them to Jewish history. This serves a number of purposes. Even more important to me than placing messianism within a political framework is the continued effort to place Jewish history within the context of the surrounding society. I seek to place Jewish Messianism within the context of similar movements produced in the Christian and Islamic worlds. Furthermore, I propose that Messianism as a political movement offers us a way to talk about Jewish politics. Jewish history has traditionally suffered from not being able to employ the traditional State narrative, for most of recorded history there has been no such thing as a sovereign Jewish State. More important to modern scholars is the lack of a Jewish political tradition. Messianism allows us a backdoor to bring Jews as actors into the political narrative, beyond being the victims of hateful mobs and capricious rulers. Thus helping us move away from the Heinrich Graetz “Jews suffer and think” lachrymose narrative. Furthermore, by dealing with messianic theorists and their confrontation with worldly politics, we can begin to construct a tradition of Jewish political thought. For this reason, I will be discussing not just actual messianic movements such as the Sabbatians, but messianic theorists such as Maimonides and Abarbanel as well.

As a multi-disciplinary project, my work should be of use in a number of fields. This is a work on Jewish history and particularly Jewish Messianism. The models I propose should be relevant to general students of Messianism and apocalypticism. Finally this is also a work of political theory meant to aid in the understanding of how to integrate Messianism as a political phenomenon.

Sparkly Fairy Vampire Princess Versus Puppy-Eared Half Demon

Recently I have gotten into the Japanese anime show InuYasha and have been watching it on Hulu. It is about a school girl named Kagome, who is transported, Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe style, to medieval Japan, which functions as a Narnia fantasy world complete with all manner of magical creatures. She has to team up with a half-demon warrior named InuYasha to recover the fragments of a sacred pearl. These serve as lots of little rings of power. Along the way, they gain for allies Shippo, a cute half-fox kid, Miroku, a sleazy monk and Sango, a demon hunter wielding a giant boomerang and a giant flying kitty. They take on a host of villains such as InuYasha’s older brother, Sesshomaru, the resurrected priestess Kikyo, who broke InuYasha’s heart and left him skewered against a tree for fifty years, and the ultimate villain, Naraku, who is less interested in killing our heroes as using them to further corrupt the pearl. I think of Naraku as a less sophisticated version of Lord Foul from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. The plot that you see it really bait to fall into the real plot, which is usually more interesting than simply kill the good guys.

The person who recommended InuYasha to me also happens to be a fierce opponent of Twilight, who finds Bella to be too passive and Edward to be down right abusive. I find this strange because I find myself liking InuYasha precisely for the same reasons why I liked Twilight. For me, the main draw of Twilight was normal girl Bella being thrown into this horror fantasy situation of having vampires and werewolves as the chief men in her life. Bella is never fazed by anything and insists on playing the comic straight as she applies her normal person logic to her supernatural life, taking everything to its logical absurdity. The fact that Bella has an incredible level of control over Edward and Jacob, despite not being "powerful" in any conventional sense is itself a form of fantasy wish fulfillment empowerment. Similarly, Kagome applies her school girl logic and concerns about homework and tests as she runs around her fantasy medieval Japan with her puppy-eared half demon in tow, while going questing after magical objects. She has her perfect magic boyfriend to have go fetch and literally say "sit" to. InuYasha, like Edward, might be verbally abusive, but it is in a sulking charming schoolboy sense and made up for by romantic daring and witty back and forth dialogue.  

Like Stephenie Meyer, but working long before she came on the scene, Rumiko Takahashi seeks to overturn the action superhero genre and render it into something more likely to appeal to women. She does this in two ways. First, she places a female as the central protagonist and tells the story from her perspective. It is interesting to note that this does not mean that the female character has to be empowered. Both Kagome and Bella are fairly passive characters, though Kagome is less so, surrounded and protected by more powerful men. Just as with historical narrative, the mere fact that a female is granted narrative goes a long way to neutralizing misogyny. One can take the same patriarchal story, but simply by giving the female narrative you have made her an active figure and ultimately allowed her to gain a level of humanity. Second, InuYasha, like Twilight, takes the action genre and turns it into a tongue and cheek romance. What looks like a blood and violence story is revealed to be a love story as the monster is rendered with a hidden soulful side that yearns to love and be loved in return. Thus the "male" paradigm of power and violence is defeated by "female" charm, empowering not just the seemingly passive female protagonist, but the feminine as a whole. 

    

Michael Oren: An Ambassador for Historians

I have been reading Michael Oren's Six Days of War about the Six Day War. One wonders if the people who protested his speech at UC of Irvine had read it. It probably would not have made much of a difference if they did. What struck me about Ambassador Oren, from reading his work, was the extent to which he goes to putting a human face to the Arab side. Oren uses a variety of sources to tell the story from multiple perspectives. Since he is not just using Israeli sources he is not forced into just telling the Israeli side to things. He uses American sources to bring the American government into the story, Soviet sources to bring the Soviet Union in and Arabic sources to bring the various Arab countries in. This very act of bringing Arab sources and seeking to come to terms with their narrative in of itself goes a long toward giving a balanced story. By doing this Oren, from the beginning, concedes to Arabs that they have a perspective and are not merely the satanic other. As such the story is no longer "you Arabs are the villains who must simply repent your wrongdoing and accept the judgment of the world against you." This sentiment is summarized by Oren in his introduction:

My purpose is not to prove the justness of one party or another in the war, or to assign culpability for starting it. I want, simply, to understand how an event as immensely influential as this war came about – to show the context from which it sprang and the catalysts that precipitated it.

I would describe Oren's narrative as a counter to the Leon Uris narrative of Zionism, for example in his novel Exodus. The world that Oren describes is distinctively not one in which it is simply heroic Israelis, outnumbered and outgunned, fending off hordes of Arabs intent on finishing what Hitler started. This is a drama moving from political to military leaders to diplomats. The actors are motivated by various things. Probably the most interesting thing about the book is Oren's argument that war was not inevitable. Diplomacy was something that could have worked if it were not for chance and the haphazard’s of Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian foreign policy between themselves and the Soviet Union and the power of the Arab street.

Michael Oren, while writing a pro-Israel book, manages to use his skill as a historian to offer a narrative that all sides could accept as a basis for a peace agreement. The fact that Oren would be a target of anti-Israel protestors demonstrates to what extent opponents of Israel are distant from ever coming to a meaningful peace. Not only do they reject Israel in practice, but they even reject the right of supporters of Israel to have any narrative of their own. There can be no negotiation, but simply the surrender of Israel as it confesses to being the villains and begs the pardon of the Arab world.

The Hamas Spy

Rich Schapiro of Daily News has an article, "Mosab Hassan Yousef: The Hamas prince who was spy for Israel" on Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a prominent Hamas leader who served as a spy for Israel. On the surface it would appear as if this would argue against Eli Berman, about whom I posted earlier. Professor Berman makes the case that the strength of groups like Hamas is precisely their ability to weed out informants.

The answer comes at the end of the article:

In a statement from prison, he [Sheikh Hassan Yousef] said it was possible the Israelis recruited his son, but that his son had no access to the movement's secrets.

"Whether what Haaretz reported is true or not, Mosab was not an active member in Hamas or in any of its military, political or religious branches, or any other body," the elder Yousef said.

People who come through the system are more trustworthy and less likely to turn traitor than even family members. If you are going to build a terrorist organization you need a social service network, not a large family.

The Book Club Classroom (or How to Destroy School)

There is another possible working model for Alfie Kohn's homework free class that is worth consideration, the book club. When I lived in Columbus I co-chaired a book club for those on the autism spectrum. Every week we would meet for an hour and discuss around fifty pages of a given book. We did books ranging from two to four hundred pages so we did a different book about every one to two months. We did short stories like Isaac Asimov's robot stories, Sherlock Holmes and H. P. Lovecraft. We also did full novels like Killer Angels, Twilight, Catch-22 and Sabriel. Like any classroom, we had a range of people in the club. In our case, we ranged from graduate students in literature to people who had trouble picking up books to read to begin with. Not everyone did the reading every week (some less often than others) so we usually did not have full participation. Also, not everyone came every week. No one was forced to come to book club. We were there because we liked the company and liked talking about the books.

It is not unreasonable that our book club could be used to replace a literature class. The sort of "class" this would give us would be much more democratic and there would be no mandatory homework or tests. The teacher could come to the first day of class with some suggested books and the students could come with some of their suggestions. Everyone could make their case for their book of choice and, afterwards, everyone could vote. The book with the most votes wins. Other books that did not win can still be considered for the next vote and it would be even expected that books (like presidential candidates) will lose in their first run, which will serve to bring it to people's attention, only to win on the next try. After choosing a book, it will be announced that we will be discussing a certain number of pages or chapters for the next class. Some people will do the reading and take part in the class discussion and others won't. When the book is finished we can vote on the next book and the process continues. Since no one has to do any of the assignments there is no reason to give tests or even to give grades. Everyone is in class because they want to be. Some people might actually want to talk about the books and others might just want to hang out.

This process could easily be adapted to history. Greetings class in modern Jewish history, I am your teacher. For this coming week would you like to talk about Hasidism, the Enlightenment, the Holocaust or the founding of the State of Israel? Once we have picked the topic I can point you to the relevant parts of the textbook, primary sources, and outside academic literature that you may wish to read. Please feel no pressure, do the reading if you feel like it and if you would like to actively take part in class. If there is a topic that really interests you, I will gladly help you do further research and will even to write a paper. I am not in charge of you; you are all here because you wish to be. I am simply here to help run discussions and so that my particularly training in these fields may be used.

The potential problem with this is its mandatory nature. Those students who do not do the non-mandatory reading are for all intents and purposes not in class and are no different from the students who do not bother to even show up to this non-mandatory class. One can certainly make a very good case that modern Jewish history and even literature are not of critical importance and that therefore there is no need for them to be mandatory. These are nice things for students to engage in and so they should be available for those students who wish to take the classes. The moment we decide that class should be mandatory then we commit ourselves to making sure that students actually come to class and actually doing work. This means that we actually have to check to see if the work is being done. This means graded homework and tests.

The question of payment raises similar issues. As long as I am doing the book club on a volunteer basis it is only something of interest to me whether anyone actually gains something from coming to book club. The moment I become a salaried teacher then I become answerable to the school, which directly pays my salary, and to parents, who indirectly pay my salary. Obviously, they are paying me to run my book club classroom for a reason and it is only reasonable that I offer some hard evidence to show that their money is not being wasted. By assigning homework and tests I can procure hard empirical evidence that my students have mastered the concepts that I was paid to give over (or that my students are lazy/stupid and it is not my fault).

In theory, this book club model can be used even for math and science allowing us to turn the entire school system into a series of book clubs in which students can pursue their interests without ever being forced to do homework or take a test. Teachers would either be volunteers or baby sitters hired for their particular academic training. This would mean the end of mandatory schooling. Let us be honest, this means my childhood dream of destroying school would come true, leaving students with clubs to attend (if they wish). The adult me might also be willing to do away with school, but is this Kohn's plan?