I’ve discussed this with others who have commented on Eli Zaretsky’s recent post, “Why Obama Lost the Debate.” Now that the Biden-Ryan debate is history, it becomes more clear than ever to me that even when the Democrat shows up swinging, as Biden did and Obama didn’t, they miss a key point: they have let the Republicans change the conversation from the malfeasance and abuses of Wall Street to the Federal deficit and the imagined misdeeds of unionized public employees.

Like Bertram Miller, one of those I engaged with at Eli’s post, I’m a tremendous fan of the Nobel Prize-winning economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman. From day one of the Obama term, Krugman pointed out that the size of the stimulus package that was passed within the opening weeks of the Obama administration would be too small to turn the economy around completely and thereby create an opening that would be deftly exploited by the Republicans claiming that government spending not only doesn’t work but also is a problem in itself. Some voices within the administration–including, surprisingly, the oft-reviled Clinton-era hand, Larry Summers–agreed that the package was too small, but support in the Senate seems honestly to have been inadequate for something bigger. Unlike Bertram Miller, I don’t think that the 60-vote filibuster hurdle could have been transcended through a budget-reconciliation maneuver, which is designed for a more narrow and specific purpose than this huge piece of legislation. But the administration has fallen down in not explaining and then vigorously defending what it was doing.

The Democrats have needed all along to defend the principle of smart, socially and economically useful governmental expenditures, especially at this time of severe economic downturn. They kind of do that, but not very clearly and without the relentlessly effective simplicity of the GOP’s small government/free enterprise sloganeering. If one can forgive the militaristic tone of “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,” which Biden coined at about the time of the Democratic National Convention, this is a good counter slogan. But how ever this message is worded, it needs to show the administration’s concrete achievements (literally) in infrastructure and other spending to staunch the headlong slide into another Great Depression. For example, how is it that the Dems haven’t energetically pointed out that in not renewing the subsidies to the states in the original stimulus legislation, the Republicans have forced the layoff of a half million state and local civil servants, including many teachers, firefighters and police?

It’s Sukkot, the seven or eight-day autumn holiday (depending upon how you classify Simchat Torah) in which religious people eat their meals in a loosely constructed booth (a sukkah) gaily decorated with plant materials. “Ushpizin” is a charming seriocomic Israeli drama, made in 2004, depicting a particularly tempestuous Sukkot in the lives of a Hasidic couple in modern-day Jerusalem.

Sukkah in Jerusalem

Liberal Jews have strong feelings about the limited cultural vistas and the unhealthy political influences that we see on Israeli policies from this quarter–more perhaps in the intrusion of religion into the affairs of state and civil life than on attitudes toward peace-making, where the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) are often confused with the national-religious camp. But this film reminds us of the positive spiritual dimension to the Haredi lifestyle.

Dramatic changes of fortune are seen as divine intervention, an answer to their devotion and a part of their ongoing dialogue with God. When bad fortune strikes, they are rendered bereft not only by the event itself, but also by the notion that they have done something displeasing in the eyes of God or, even more painfully, that their suffering has meaning they cannot fathom in the sacred scheme of things.

When I think of my parents’ tale of survival, and what they lost, the Holocaust becomes personal. It also has occurred to me that my father was never more savvy nor persevering in his life than when leading his young wife and her widowed aunt to safety in the United States: through countries under attack (Yugoslavia and Greece) and in rebellion (Iraq) to the other side of the world (British India), and back around the horn of Africa, up to the Americas and to New Jersey where they first settled.

Filmmaker David Fisher (R) with siblings: Gideon, Esti, Ronel

Sept. 28 marks the commercial debut of “Six Million And One,” David Fisher’s true-life depiction of his Israeli family coming to grips with how the Holocaust affected them. Twelve years after his survivor-father’s death, he discovers his diary of remembrances from his months of captivity, first deported from his home in Hungary to Auschwitz and then to the slave labor camps of Mauthausen-Gusen and Gunskirchen in Austria. The filmmaker conscripts his two brothers and one sister into retracing their father’s steps in Austria, basically browbeating them into joining him.

My father showed a resourcefulness and resolution in those years that he did not generally manifest in the rest of his life. In parallel terms, David Fisher and his siblings found a depth of soul and expressiveness in their father’s diary that he apparently lacked while bringing them up. They spoke of the “physicality” of how their father conceived the world and interacted with them, how he could not understand his children on an emotional level. Yet, despite everything, it must be acknowledged that both fathers succeeded in raising normal families.

Jeannette Catsoulis, a reviewer for the NY Times, wrote “Brief Lives, Violently Extinguished” on a new documentary film about the terrible human toll of Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip in Dec. 2008-Jan. 2009. This is most of her short article:

A brutally uncompromising blast of outrage, Vibeke Lokkeberg’s “Tears of Gaza” is less a documentary than a collage of suffering. Dropping us smack in the middle of the Israeli attacks on Gaza in the winter of 2008-9, the film tramples politics beneath the raw weight of civilian testimony. Woven together, these monologues of bereavement and confusion, illustrated with images so terrible they repel rational explanation, form a tapestry of human misery that’s impossible to shake off.

…. Postcarnage interviews allow the stunned reactions of three surviving children to shape a quiet meditation on lives irretrievably altered.

Unwaveringly committed to a method that spits on context, “Tears of Gaza” forces us to ask a single, electric question: Amid this much horror, does context even matter?

My own review at The Forward’s Arty Semite blog does not dispute the brutal facts of Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead”; I am repelled by the human cost of this military action and feel nothing but compassion for the three Palestinian children featured in the film. Still, although I understand it, I disagree entirely with the contempt for context displayed by the filmmaker and endorsed by the NY Times reviewer.

Reuters photo of U.S. Consulate burning in Benghazi, Libya

Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012 was a gorgeous sunny and crisp late-summer day in New York, just like that notorious Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, which had touched me directly; the smell of burnt plastic and other debris wafted by my Manhattan apartment at the end of a day that changed our world forever. This past Tuesday was the first 9/11 anniversary since I began blogging over six years ago that I chose not to post anything about it. But the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi pulled me back.

This is an evolving story, but after some confusion, it appears that the film that ostensibly sparked the violence now widespread in the Muslim world was made by a Coptic-Christian resident of California, originally from Egypt, who claimed initially to be a Jew from Israel. It was promoted by a Christian anti-Muslim activist and radio personality named Steve Klein. Regardless, the 13-minute trailer went viral via YouTube after being dubbed into Arabic.

Time cover, Sept. 24, 2012 issue (photo by Amr Abdallah Dalsh /Reuters)

This is how the film is described in the Israeli daily, Ha’aretz:

…. The film claims [the Prophet] Muhammad was a fraud. An English-language 13-minute trailer on YouTube shows an amateur cast performing a wooden dialogue of insults disguised as revelations about Muhammad, whose obedient followers are presented as a cadre of goons.
It depicts Muhammad as a feckless philanderer who approved of child sexual abuse, among other overtly insulting claims that have caused outrage. …

Obviously, Muslims have good reason to feel outrage. Yet most people in the Middle East have no concept that the United States government does not control the film industry or what is posted on the Internet. As hateful as this film is, it would almost certainly violate the First Amendment for the government to shut it down; YouTube itself would have to remove this offensive video.

But what can we say about the behavior of violent demonstrators, let alone Jihadists who may have used this as an excuse to launch a premeditated attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi? What should we say about people who express their indignation by violence against people and property? To raise such questions is to answer them.

My vacation reading last month included a memoir of sorts (Early Companions: A Novella) by Werner Cohn, a retired professor of sociology with whom I’ve dialogued and argued over the years. It’s labelled as fiction because he disguises the identities of some people he writes about in short sections that relate to chapters in his life. In one, he discusses his years growing up as a Jew in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. In the second, he relates his brief time as a young member of a revolutionary socialist group in New York, headed by Max Shachtman. Finally, he recounts the beginning of his career as a young professor of sociology at a Canadian university, focusing upon the enigmatic life and death of a charismatic academic who was likewise a Jewish emigre from Nazi Germany.

Cohn on his book's backcover

It’s the middle part about Shachtman and the rarely acknowledged influences that he had, which I examine here. Cohn is undoubtedly correct in ridiculing the grandiose sectarian belief system that his “comrades” promoted at the time; his portrait of CLR James (aka Jimmy Johnson) is especially devastating, and his depiction of Irving Howe as an arrogant enforcer of discipline for Shachtman also seems accurate. But Prof. Cohn did not pick up the story of Shachtman and Howe becoming more important later on.

Shachtman began as an American disciple of Leon Trotsky, breaking with the exiled revolutionary in 1939 over the nature of the Soviet Union. Trotsky regarded the USSR as a “deformed workers’ state,” worthy of defense by virtue of being a “workers’ state.” Shachtman postulated that the Stalinist state had given rise to a party elite that constituted a new ruling class oppressing the workers. He laid out this theory years later in The Bureaucratic Revolution: The Rise of the Stalinist State (Donald Press, 1962). This line of Shachtman’s thinking inspired an independent socialist current that was in revolutionary opposition to both the capitalist West and the Stalinist East. This “Third Camp” brand of radicalism is perhaps best exemplified in the US today by the New Politics journal and the Campaign for Peace and Democracy.

In recent years, I’ve come to know two single mothers with daughters adopted from China. Both girls are very aware of their origin, even as they feel strongly Jewish. Adopted ten years ago at 15 months, the younger girl is an especially beautiful pre-teen, but her mother often remarks how different she is than expected. She has a learning disability that may prevent her from living up to the stereotype of the quiet, academically-gifted Asian-American. Instead, she’s tempestuous and a natural athlete who excels at soccer.

Fang Lee at Chinese market (photos courtesy of Linda Goldstein Knowlton)

“Somewhere Between” is an uplifting documentary film that relates the lives in America of four teenagers who are among the 80,000 girls brought here from China since 1989, due to its “one-child family” policy (nearly 100,000 more are adopted in other countries). The title is taken from what Jenni Lee (who generally goes by her Chinese name of Fang–pronounced “Fong”) says about her in-between identity. It debuts commercially at New York’s IFC Center on Aug. 24, with a national roll-out to follow.

Fang was adopted at five, after being left by her brother in the middle of a big city. Her sense of abandonment is especially acute, as compared with the other girls who were more typically abandoned as infants. She is the only one of the four who remains fluent in Chinese, an ability no doubt assisted by her American mother learning to speak Mandarin with her at home.

A student at Berkeley High School during the filming, she radiates a maturity and compassionate nature that should be the envy of any parent. She goes back to China with some frequency, to help orphaned and abandoned children

Recently, I was made aware of a 2009 ZNet article entitled “Jews Are Not an Equity-Seeking Group — How Myths about Anti-Semitism Distort Human Rights in Our Schools and Universities,” by Jason Kunin – a left-wing Canadian-Jewish blogger.

Analytically, Kunin has a point: there is a difference between prejudice and oppression, and happily, Jews suffer little oppression today as compared with decades ago. But he completely discounts prejudice as the seedbed for oppression, when masses of people are effectively propagandized to give their prejudice full rein. This is what happened in Nazi Germany where antisemitism was actually less prevalent than in Eastern Europe; the Holocaust was most devastating in Eastern Europe where antisemitism was an especially popular prejudice.

Kunin also has no regard for the way in which the genocidal oppression of the Nazi era, followed by the mass expulsion of Jews from most of the Muslim Middle East, haunt Jews to this day. The fact that extreme Islamist forces explicitly target Jews–as illustrated in the premeditated killings of Lubavich emissaries during the attack on Mumbai in 2008 and the murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl (a “Zionist Jew”) decapitated in Pakistan in 2002–is a kind of oppression. For the most part, it’s not healthy for Jews to advertise their Jewishness in Muslim countries.

To start with, I don’t believe that anti-Israel Jewish activists are literally hating themselves. Israel has engaged in quite enough wrong-doing and morally questionable policies to explain their way of thinking. Yet I still see Jewish self-hatred as having credibility as an analytic concept, and perhaps in explaining the vehemence of such views.

Joseph Stalin; is Stalinism implicated in 'Jewish self-hatred'?

These views often focus exclusively on Israeli misdeeds without any regard for provocations and misdeeds from the other side, nor proportionate concern for far greater human rights catastrophes in much of the Arab and Islamic worlds. To cite some glaring examples: mass murders in the Sudan over the last 30 years and still occurring, Qaddafi’s blood-soaked rule and downfall in Libya, the ongoing terror attacks against civilians in Iraq and Pakistan, and the ever-growing death toll in Syria.

What got me thinking about this phenomenon was a recent piece by the conservative Jerusalem Post columnist and blogger Isi Liebler. He abuses the term to attack liberal and left-leaning Israelis and Jews, even as he denies doing this. For example, he concludes his “self-hatred” screed by warning against applying this term “indiscriminately against naïve well-meaning ‘bleeding hearts’ or legitimate critics of Israeli policies with whom we may disagree.” Yet in the scores of columns and blog posts I’m aware of, I cannot recall Liebler ever granting legitimacy to such critics.

Still, Liebler is correct that the modern phenomenon is largely a by-product of left-wing political culture. It originated with the large number of Jews who involved themselves in mass parties on the left in early to mid-20th century Europe and the English-speaking countries. (It may be noted in this connection that while never breaking through to major-party status, both the American Socialist and Communist parties had tens of thousands of members and the Socialists won about a million votes nationally at least twice.) These Jews often attempted to ingratiate themselves with their Gentile comrades by either not being overtly “Jewish” or showing themselves “progressive” by loudly denouncing legitimate Jewish concerns as “parochial” or not “universalistic.”

Vidal in 2009

Upon learning of Gore Vidal’s passing, I immediately thought of this highbrow celebrity’s flirtation with antisemitism. But an illuminating article in The Forward gave me pause about seeing him as fundamentally antisemitic. It mentioned that his live-in companion from 1950 to 2003, Howard Austen, was Jewish and that he assisted him to overcome the antisemitism of the advertising industry that had excluded him from a job in the 1950s. Vidal’s suggestion to change his Jewish-sounding family name of “Auster” to the WASP-y sounding “Austen” got him hired at a prominent firm.

The NY Times obit did not mention his Jewish controversies, but rather covered his remarkable record as a novelist, playwright, essayist and acerbic wit, often featured on late-night television talk shows. Vidal was something of a left-wing isolationist, who was even quoted as belittling Pres. Clinton’s apology for not having dispatched troops to end the genocide in Rwanda. His opposition to such humanitarian interventions was likely a result of losing the reputed love of his life, a prep school classmate who became a Marine killed at the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945.

The Forward article mentioned the foreword he wrote for the anti-Zionist Israeli writer Israel Shahak‘s 1994 book that attacks Judaism as the hateful wellspring for Zionism—Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years. As it happens, Werner Cohn, now a retired professor of sociology with whom I’ve dialogued and argued over the years, published a review of this book in 1994, in Israel Horizons, a left-wing Zionist publication that I edited at the time. Despite my differences with Prof. Cohn on Israel and other matters, I value his perspective on Shahak: