An Old Speech of Mine on Affirmative Action

For those of you interested in what I really think about affirmative action, here is the text of a speech I gave at Yeshiva University back in 2003 as part of a contest. I ended up coming in fourth place, just missing out on winning prize money. This speech was given while the Supreme Court was hearing the Michigan cases of Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger on affirmative action. The argument I offer follows a similar line of reasoning to what I offered in regards to Aryan coffee. We cannot even begin to talk about a government interest in diversity unless we also admit a government interest in conformity in which case we are trapped into accepting segregation as at least having a plausible legitimacy.


A key corollary to the fourteenth amendment is title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. According to Title VI: No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." As Senator Ribicoff explained it: "Basically, there is a constitutional restriction against discrimination in the use of federal funds; and title VI simply spells out the procedure to be used in enforcing that restriction." This sentiment was endorsed by Justice Powell in the Bakke the decision. Bakke has recently come back into the public eye. This past month the Supreme Court has heard two cases involving the issue of Racial preferences in regards to University admissions: one involving the University of Michigan's undergraduate admissions policy (Gratz v. Bollinger, 02-51), and one involving the University of Michigan's law school admissions policy (Grutter v. Bollinger 02-241). These are two very different cases. In Gratz, the undergraduate case, there is a point system, in which prospective students are given points based on such categories as where they live and how they scored on various tests. In one of these categories, twenty points are awarded to prospective students who are either athletes, come from impoverished backgrounds or are a part of specific minority groups. In Grutter, the law school admissions case, the University simply has a stated policy that it should tailor its admissions program in order to achieve a critical mass of minority students within its classes.

The argument in regards to these cases is not about whether Michigan is in violation of, at the very least the letter, of title VI. The ACLU, which has written an amicus curiae brief in support of the university, claims though, that Michigan's admissions policy is a compelling state interest since it enables the University to have a diverse student body. I ask on this; if the state, or the institutions that it funds, has the right, even the duty, to ignore title VI out of a compelling interest in diversity, as Michigan, the ACLU along with over sixty other organizations are claiming, then cannot the state also choose to ignore title VI out of other compelling interests? Diversity certainly is not the state's only compelling interest.

America, if you think about, is in a sense, for better or for worse, the great experiment in conformity. Crucial to American Civics is the notion that we are going throw Italians, Jews, Poles, Germans etc. together onto our golden streets and everybody is going to somehow turn into Americans. We generally call this phenomenon "the Melting Pot." If one can claim diversity to be a compelling state interest then certainly one can also claim that the venerable melting pot of conformity is also a compelling state interest.

Once states can get around Title VI by claiming a compelling interest in conformity then Title VI becomes absolutely meaningless. What would happen IF the University of South Carolina would decide that in keeping with its compelling interest in having a student body that conforms, the University will from now on tailor its admissions policy in a manner designed to avoid achieving a critical mass of minorities on its campus? What if South Carolina were to decide to give white applicants, along with athletes and students from impoverished backgrounds, an extra twenty points on their admissions scores? On what grounds could the University be legally stopped? Not Title VI, for the University can claim to have a compelling interest in ignoring title VI.

What the compelling state interest argument ignores is the fact that the body of Civil Rights legislation came about in order to get around the claim that the institutions of slavery and segregation were compelling state interests. The fourteenth amendment and title VI only make sense if we accept the words of Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter in the Plessy vs. Ferguson. "Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved." The colorblind constitution is the only for the just and free society to triumph over the claims of compelling state interest.

Playing the Devil’s Advocate for Affirmative Action

I serve as the faculty advisor (otherwise known as the resident adult) for the political science club here at the Hebrew Academy. We have a very talented and outspoken group of guys and even a few girls and I am honored to be able to work with them. (I think it would make for an interesting study as to general male to female ratio in high school political science clubs. Is there something about being in a room full of people arguing with each other, often with raised voices, that pushes teenage girls away? I do make the extra effort to make sure that girls get to say their piece and are made to feel at home.) I guess it says something about white male Orthodox Jewish teenagers from middle-class backgrounds attending private school, but it is a fairly conservative group in terms of its politics. This has put me in a funny position. Politically I am what most people would view as a conservative, even if I am still to the left of many of these kids. Regardless of my politics, I do not think my role as a teacher is preaching my politics. I am here to pass on a method of critical analysis, one that will likely lead students to very different conclusions from mine. In general, I think this is the critical defense in terms of keeping one's own biases in check. It is okay to have strongly held opinions as long as you care more about the process that leads to such ideas than the actual ideas themselves. This leaves me in the ironic position where for me to be silent would be to guarantee a strongly conservative tilt to discussions. My solution to this problem has been to speak up from time to time to play the role of the "liberal." Not because I wish these students to become liberals, but because, regardless of what I might think, I am not about to allow, on my watch, students to walk away without hearing what an intelligent liberal sounds like. I may be speaking to the future leaders of the Republican Party, but a general political science club should not be the same thing as the Young Republicans.

This past week, I ended up speaking more than I usually do. The reason for this was that the topic of the week was affirmative action. Certainly a good topic to discuss since it directly affects these students in the here and now. Within a year or two, all of these students, if they have not done so already, will be applying to college, many them even to elite colleges. This is also precisely the sort of topic to bring out the most conservative tendencies in the group. The group is the very picture of an argument against affirmative action. These are white male middle-class private school students and in this case being Jewish is not going to win them any minority points. Looking around at the group, I know someone here is going to lose out on their college of choice. Essentially affirmative action in this context translates into: kids you need to sacrifice your slot at an elite college, which you have earned through your hard work and intelligence, to a total stranger for the good of society; all of this despite the fact that no one in the room, including me, is old enough to remember segregation.

So for the first time in my life, I found myself standing in front of a public audience and defending affirmative action. What I learned from the experience was that the case for affirmative action works to the extent that it is a moderate short-term pragmatic solution to a present-day problem. No, affirmative action does not mean that you are going to get a D+ black doctor working on you. It might mean that you end up with a B+ doctor, but you need to keep in mind that the focus on grades privileges the white student at the expense of other means of evaluation that might favor our black student. No one is going to be getting anything, not a job, not admittance to college, which they are not qualified for. I went to Ohio State where much of the student body comes from rural Ohio, which is predominantly white. Many of these students have grown up not personally knowing many blacks. We have a societal interest in changing this; no one should be able to go through four years of college and not regularly interact with students of a different color. You can talk all you want about improving education and that might help students in kindergarten, but we have to deal with students applying to college in the here and now. And let us be honest, you kids have benefited, even if it is just a little bit, from the legacy of racism that continues to live on in this country, just as your black competition has suffered ever so slightly from it. Is it not fair and reasonable to agree to at least a moderate level of affirmative action?

I eventually got stopped and asked: but you are a libertarian, how could you support affirmative action? I must admit that this was an argument I could not talk myself around. At the heart of my Libertarianism is an attempt to get around and deny the very relevance of the sort of liberal arguments I was using.  Only direct physical suffering is relevant to the government so all side effects of a racially charged culture are off the table. I do not recognize the existence of racial groups, only free and equal individuals. Government serves to protect people from physical harm not to make people more moral or build a more tolerant society. Bent over a barrel, I had to admit to playing the devil's advocate here. I guess I might be able to personally go along with affirmative action if we were talking about private institutions. I already am willing to put up with Aryan coffee shops.

Benjamin Linus the Christ Killing Jew

The character on the television show Lost that I relate to the most is Benjamin Linus. He is a morally ambiguous character, who always has a plan. He is the sort of character whom you may have a gun pointed at, but he really is the one who has you where he wants you. The really interesting thing that the writers have done with him is that somehow they have kept him from being a straight villain. Admittedly, he would be worth it as just a really creepy villain. The writers, though, have allowed him to be something more complex. They have gone through a tremendous amount of effort to make this work. Ben is the head of the Others. He kidnapped and plotted against our plane crash survivor heroes. He shot John Locke (the bald guy, not the philosopher) in cold blood. Later on in the show, he finally manages to do John Locke in by strangling him. He successfully murdered his own father years before the show. He stood by and allowed his foster daughter to die rather than give himself up and save her. Most shockingly of all, at the end of the last season, at the instigation of the satanic smoke monster, he murders the show's Christ figure, Jacob. In Lost's version of the passion, Ben turns on Jacob and repeatedly stabs him, getting Jacob's blood all over the temple room. Jacob is not wholly dead and continues to appear to the schizophrenic Hurley. This is like Jesus' resurrection before the apostles. Obviously, Jacob has foreseen the plot of the island's imprisoned Lucifer, the smoke monster now taking the form of a brilliantly evil John Locke, and has allowed himself to be "crucified" for some higher purpose. Despite all that Ben has done, the show has not placed him beyond redemption. He has now refused the chance to join the smoke monster and his followers even to save himself. Even knowing his crimes, the followers of Jacob step back from killing Ben and still accept him, even if begrudgingly.

I think of Ben as the Pharisee Jew. He is very learned and clever and believes that, because of these qualities, he is the chosen of the "god" figure of the island, Jacob. This belief is first challenged when he gets a tumor and the island does not miraculously heal it. Instead, a surgeon is "dropped out of the sky" in the form of Jack Shepherd of the plane crash survivors. Ben is particularly jealous of John Locke, whom the island miraculously allowed to walk again as soon as he crashed on to it. Furthermore, Locke is able to hear Jacob's voice, something never granted to Ben. Ben, therefore, Cain-like, attempts to murder Locke, but the island saves him. Finally Ben confronts Jacob, the human embodiment of the island and its power, to understand why Jacob has rejected him. Jacob refuses to offer the answers that Ben wants to hear to allow himself to finally make sense of his life and all of his pious sacrifices that he has made in service of Jacob and the island. Jacob refuses to be the straight forward savior God that Ben would like to believe in and instead continues to work in mysteries so Ben, feeling betrayed, commits his act of deicide. I see Lost playing itself out as a Joachim of Fiore type of redemption for our Jew, Ben. According to the medieval apocalyptic Joachim, the Jews were the chosen people of God, but they rejected him and God has punished them. The Jews, though, remain God's special people and, in the end of days, they are going to accept Christ and play a leading role in bringing about the Second Coming. Similarly, Ben really is a chosen person of the island, but his desire to be openly declared the one and only chosen one has caused him to stray to such an extent that he could fall under the influence of Satan serve his plan to kill God incarnate. Ben, as a chosen one, is still going to be saved. He is going to repent his past transgressions, humbly bow to Jacob's mysterious will and accept that there can be other chosen ones. He is going to join the new people of Jacob and save the island.

This season has brought another twist to Jacob's character. In the alternative timeline in which the Oceanic plane does not crash, Ben is a high-school history teacher even though he has a doctorate in European history. He attempts to teach his students about Napoleon despite the fact that most of them could not care less. He mixes a contempt for the students as a whole with a deep affection for those students who wish to learn. So here you have it, an academic history teacher working in a high school, who is really a Jew and has all sorts of plans to rule the world. I am rubbing my hands in Monty Burns glee.

Excellent!

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.