Joel Schalit

Their Eyes Were Watching Gaza

Political insight is almost always far-sighted, and the Americans who invest their energy in worrying about the Israel-Palestine conflict are no exception. It is no accident that leftists in the United States started paying closer attention to that topic right when the American government, preoccupied with its own agenda, stopped doing so. The Bush Administration’s hands-off approach to the conflict, in sharp contrast to that of the administrations that preceded it, cried out for initiatives to be undertaken in civil society.

It wasn’t just the Bush Administration’s neglect of the Israel-Palestine conflict that elevated it to a central cause of the post-9/11 American Left, of course. But it sure helped. Indeed, as much anger as the Administration’s approach to the region inspired, that neglect may have been more influential in the end, for what it cleared was a pathway to intervention. Progressives were already struggling with a profoundly limited sense of agency. In the absence of government involvement, however, they found it easier to imagine their actions having a direct effect on the situation in Israel and Palestine. From this perspective, the absence of official interference actually seemed to be as much a blessing as a curse.

As the decade wore on, American political opinions about the conflict appeared to be significantly less hampered by the poorly informed provincialism that both Israelis and Europeans have long ascribed to the United States. Whether or not one agrees with the positions that Americans started adopting as a consequence of their interest in the topic is not important. What matters is that we take that investment seriously, understanding that it is the result of the Middle East’s increasing prominence in the psychological life of the United States.

-Excerpted from Israel vs. Utopia

Burning Down the House

When we first moved into the neighborhood, we rented an apartment from a former aide to House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Always eager to talk politics with me, almost every time we spoke, our ex-landlord would inevitably disclose how disappointed he was to no longer be on the local Congresswoman’s staff.

Seeing this poster pasted to the ground floor of a new condo being built down the street, I couldn’t help but think of my former landlord, and wonder how he’d react to this attack on his one-time employer. Not particularly partial to this brand of agitprop myself, for once, it seemed a little more complex than usual.

It must be the superimposed Tow Away sign, and the 666 scrawled on Pelosi’s forehead. “Endless midrash“, as we were fond of saying in my biblical hermeneutics class in grad school. Everything is commentary.

Leaving Here

I couldn’t think of a better title for this post than Motorhead’s very first single. Released on Stiff Records in 1977, it was one of the first 7″ singles I think I ever saw – in a London record store. Three days away from moving back to the UK for the first time since 1979, I couldn’t imagine a better heading to affix over this genius of a shop sign, three blocks away from where we live, on Mission street. Boasting a fist full of skull rings, Motorhead leader Lemmy Kilmister practically invented bling.

If only we were leaving here by car. Not just any, but in our prized Prius, now being cared for by friends in the People’s Republic of Berkeley. It’s just about the only hybrid we know that felt the need to balance out the obligatory Obama propaganda with a reminder that at least some of the people who will be voting for the Democrat in the upcoming US elections first thought of themselves as leftists because they listened to bands like Black Flag.

Rage Against the Washing Machine

You can always count on Vance Galloway for a memorable photo. From Sonic Youth’s Sensational Fix exhibit, which ended a three month run in Saint-Nazaire, France, on September 7th.

The European Question

Given the enormity of the losses suffered by European Jewry between 1933 and 1945, the deterioration of Israeli-European relations after the Six-Day War may seem like a quaint afterthought. Or, at the very least, an event that one would expect to have originated in Jewish instead of European circles. After all, Jewry had more than its fair share of reasons to reject European civilization in toto given the tragedy that had just befallen it. As many critical, scholarly analyses of European culture since the Second World War have demonstrated, the Nazi genocide was a perverse by-product of the same historical and social developments that helped define what it means to be Western.

Anti-Semitism was not a foreign import, but European through and through. And it wasn’t backward, a residue of pre-modern Europe, either. No, the racism expressed towards the Jews from the nineteenth century onward, even as it mobilized earlier forms of anti-Semitism, went hand in hand with the outwardly rational forces of modernity. The problem for European Jews, particularly in Western Europe, is that they typically identified with these forces as well, going out of their way to convince themselves that anti-Semitism was the antithesis of modernity.

This conviction added to the difficulty of disidentifying with Europe, even after the Holocaust had demonstrated once and for all that Jews could never hope to be fully assimilated in Gentile society, however modern it seemed.  From Theodore Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”) onward, Zionist ideology has always regarded Jewish national identity as being culturally European. What “European” meant in this context, however, was complicated. Summing up Herzl’s position in the Socialist Register in 1970, Belgian Jewish Marxist Marcel Liebman argued that Herzl envisioned his Israel-to-come as a European outpost, both for practical purposes – protection from its neighbors – and for ideological reasons.

- Excerpted from Israel vs. Utopia

Merlot Shoah

Walk three blocks in either direction from our home, and the discourse is the same.

Genocide is bad, freedom for Jews and Palestinians, good. The local used book store carries vintage Israeli vinyl, while bumper stickers decry Israeli foreign policy.

The interesting thing about all of this isn’t that it’s not recognized as a conversation between neighbors. It’s that records like the one pictured above are not appreciated for their irony.

Bernal Hebrew

No one speaks Hebrew in San Francisco. Ever. Cortland Avenue, September 2008.