Thursday, June 30, 2016

Hard Choices by Hillary Rodham Clinton, Simon & Schuster


Hard Choices by Hillary Rodham Clinton, Simon  & Schuster

Hillary Clinton’s introduction was more conventional, and more painful. After saying as First Lady in 1998 that she supported a Palestinian state, which was not yet the official American position, her own husband’s administration disavowed her. Then, the following year, she kissed Suha Arafat after the Palestinian leader’s wife accused Israel of using “poison gas” against Palestinian children, and became the subject of Republican attack ads.

The lesson Hillary learned, and has remembered ever since, is that in American politics, associating yourself with the Palestinian cause never pays. By the time she began campaigning for the Senate in New York in 2000, Hillary had adopted a very different approach to Palestinian statehood. She said that if the Palestinians “unilaterally” declared it, the United States should cut off aid. As a candidate, Hillary also defended Ariel Sharon’s September 2000 visit to the Temple Mount, slammed her husband’s administration for not vetoing a resolution critical of Israel’s response to the violence that followed, pledged to move America’s embassy to Jerusalem and said she was concerned that Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard had been denied “due process.” Most strikingly, during the first weeks of the second intifada, when Israeli soldiers fired 1.3 million bullets, Hillary, in the words of one campaign reporter, did not “earmark a syllable of compassion [even] for the most explicitly blameless of Palestinians” – Palestinian children.


In that Senate campaign, Hillary forged stronger ties to establishment American Jewish groups than Obama did while running in Illinois. And she expressed barely any of his skepticism of Israeli policy. In 2004, candidate Obama said, “The creation of a wall dividing the two nations is yet another example of the neglect of this administration in brokering peace.” Hillary, by contrast, declared herself “a strong supporter of Israel’s right to build a security barrier to try to keep those who would do harm to Israel out of Israel.” She never mentioned that most of the barrier isn’t in Israel proper but rather in the West Bank, through which it snakes in order take in as many settlements as possible.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, her aides launched sub rosa attacks on Obama for receiving advice from Bill Clinton’s National Security Council aide Rob Malley and Jimmy Carter’s former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, two foreign policy hands distrusted by mainstream Jewish groups. In the words of one well-placed congressional staffer, “every Jewish member [of Congress] knew where AIPAC was” during the 2008 Democratic primary: supporting Hillary.
But all this pales next to what Hillary has done so far in this campaign. In summer 2014, she unofficially launched her presidential bid with a book, “Hard Choices,” about her time as secretary of state. “Hard Choices” is striking both for the way it describes reality and the way it distances Hillary from the policies of the administration she served. Its discussion of Israel begins with the Obama administration’s push for a freeze on settlement growth in 2009, a freeze that Hillary calls “unprecedented.” She admits that this description “caused outrage in Arab countries,” where “people thought I was being too generous toward an offer that was qualified, short term and excluded Jerusalem.” But Hillary then congratulates herself for “telling a hard truth that would cause me trouble.” The implication is that Hillary’s Arab critics just wouldn’t give Israel a break.
But Hillary’s Arab critics were right. It’s not just that the settlement freeze excluded East Jerusalem, which is being severed from the rest of the West Bank by Israeli construction. The “freeze” also exempted buildings on which construction had already begun. This loophole proved crucial, because, as the Israeli press reported at the time, settlers spent the months preceding the freeze feverishly breaking ground on new construction, on which they continued to build during the 10-month freeze, before breaking new ground once it expired. As a result, according to the NGO Peace Now, there was more new settlement construction in 2010 – the year of the freeze – than in 2008. As Hillary’s own Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, admitted to Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, the Obama administration had wanted a freeze that truly stopped settlement growth, but “we failed.”

The real coup

Hillary’s omissions are equally striking when it comes to Gaza. She says that Hamas has “controlled [the Strip] since forcing out its rival Palestinian faction, Fatah, in 2007.” The implication is that Hamas took power in a coup. But Hamas actually won an election. In January 2006, four months after the last settlers left Gaza, Palestinians there, as well as in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, chose representatives to the Palestinian Authority’s parliament. After 10 years of dishonest and authoritarian Fatah rule, a plurality chose Hamas. According to pollster Khalil Shikaki, two-thirds of voters cited either corruption or law and order as their top issue, and 85 percent called the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority corrupt.

After its victory, Hamas called for a national unity government with Fatah “for the purpose of ending the occupation and settlements and achieving a complete withdrawal from the lands occupied [by Israel] in 1967, including Jerusalem, so that the region enjoys calm and stability during this phase.” Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, who had been elected separately the year before, would have remained president. To be sure, Hamas did not recognize Israel, accept past peace agreements or forswear violence. But former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy urged Israel to negotiate a long-term truce with the militant group (something Israel reportedly began doing this year). Israel could also have continued negotiating a two-state deal with Abbas so long as Hamas pledged to accept the outcome of a Palestinian referendum on such a deal, something the group’s leaders later promised to do.

Instead, Bush administration officials pressured Abbas to dissolve the Palestinian parliament and rule by emergency decree. Knowing Hamas would resist Abbas’ efforts to annul the election – especially in Gaza, where it was strong on the ground – the Bushies also began urging Abbas’ former national security adviser, Mohammed Dahlan, to seize power in the Strip by force. Then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pushed Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to buy weapons for Dahlan. But when the battle for Gaza began, Hamas won it easily, and brutally.
The real coup, in other words, was not launched by Hamas. It was launched by Fatah and the United States. Instead of acknowledging that decisions in Washington, Tel Aviv and Ramallah helped enable Hamas’ takeover of Gaza, Hillary leaves the reader thinking it was all just the product of Palestinian pathology.

Even more remarkable is Hillary’s near-total omission of any discussion of Israel’s blockade. Because Fatah controlled the West Bank and Hamas controlled Gaza, she writes in her memoir, “Both sides were able to test their approach to governing. The results could be seen every day in Palestinian streets and neighborhoods. In Gaza, Hamas presided over a crumbling enclave of terror and despair. It stockpiled rockets while people fell deeper into poverty. Unemployment ran to nearly 40 percent, and was even higher among young people. Hamas impeded international assistance and the work of humanitarian NGOs and did little to promote sustainable economic growth.”


What Hillary doesn’t mention is that during this “test” of Hamas and Fatah’s “approach to governing,” Israel almost totally shut down Gazan exports to Israel and the West Bank, which had accounted for 85 percent of the Strip’s external market. In the year Hillary’s book was published, according to the Israeli human rights group Gisha, less than one percent as many trucks left Gaza as had before Hamas took over.


Israeli officials justify these measures as necessary for security. And even without the blockade, it’s entirely possible that Hamas would have proved a lousy steward of Gaza’s economy. But to describe Gaza’s descent into “poverty” and “despair” without mentioning the blockade that prevented Gazans from exporting to their biggest markets is wildly dishonest. The implication, once again, is that there is only one true cause of Palestinian suffering: Palestinian depravity.


Embracing Netanyahu

In her book, Hillary also implies that Obama pressured Netanyahu too much. In 2009, in a widely reported encounter, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told Obama, “If you want Israel to take risks, then its leaders must know that the United States is right next to them.” Obama disagreed. “When there is no daylight,” he said, “Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states.” In “Hard Choices,” Hillary takes Hoenlein’s side. “I learned,” she writes, “that Bibi would fight if he felt he was being cornered, but if you connected with him as a friend, there was a chance you could get something done together.”

So eager is Hillary to prove that Netanyahu responded to her reassurances that she abandons the parameters for a two-state solution her husband famously laid out in 2000. In “Hard Choices,” she mentions that Abbas “said that he could live with an Israeli military deployment in the Jordan Valley for a few years beyond the establishment of a new state,” while Netanyahu “insisted that Israeli troops remain along the border for many decades without a fixed date for withdrawal.” Hillary deems these two perspectives equally valid, and even sees in Bibi’s a glimmer of hope. “I thought that was a potentially significant opening,” she writes. “If the conversation was about years, not decades or months, then perhaps the right mix of international security support and advanced border protection tactics and techniques could bridge the gap.”


What Hillary doesn’t mention is that Abbas’ approach conforms to the Clinton parameters – the very document she elsewhere in the book slams Yasser Arafat for not accepting – which propose that Israel leave the Jordan Valley in three years. Netanyahu’s approach, by contrast, flagrantly contradicts those parameters.


In the year since Hillary released her book, she’s done this again and again: Embraced Netanyahu’s perspective even though it eviscerates her husband's, and Obama’s, vision of a viable Palestinian state. Two months after her book release, in an August 2014 interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Hillary noted that “in my meetings with them I got Abbas to about six, seven, eight years on continued IDF presence [in the Jordan Valley] … I got Netanyahu to go from forever to 2025. That’s a negotiation, okay?” Yes, it’s a negotiation. But it’s a negotiation in which Hillary’s strategy of hugging Bibi close, and not making him feel “cornered,” allows him to lead the United States further and further away from an even modestly sovereign Palestinian state.


As the campaign has gone on, in fact, Hillary’s perspective has moved ever closer to Netanyahu’s. “I know what the hard decisions are,” she declared at a campaign stop in Iowa last month. “For the Israelis it is security … For the Palestinians, it is autonomy.” Perhaps Hillary just chose her words poorly. But what Palestinian leaders have been demanding for decades now is emphatically not autonomy; it’s sovereignty. Or, put another way, it’s the individual and national rights that sovereignty might bring. “Autonomy,” by contrast, is what Israeli leaders have periodically offered in lieu of a state. “Would the Palestinian Arabs accept autonomy?” asked Netanyahu in a 1994 Jerusalem Post op-ed entitled “The Alternative is Autonomy." He wrote: “My answer is that they would accept it if they knew Israel wouldn’t give them an independent state.”


In 2009, Netanyahu supposedly reversed this position and declared himself in favor of a Palestinian state. But this year, in a series of statements, he has publicly flipped back and made it clear he doesn’t favor Palestinian sovereignty anytime soon. Is it mere coincidence that now that Netanyahu is back to favoring “autonomy,” and Hillary is courting hawkish Jewish voters and donors, she’s aping his view?

Netanyahu’s current position is that while he still wants a Palestinian state one day, “the dramatic changes that have occurred in the last few years in the region” have made that impossible for the time being. That’s now Hillary’s view, too. In Iowa she declared that, “It is very difficult to figure out how either the Palestinians or the Israelis can put together a deal until they know what is going to happen in Syria, and until they know if Jordan will remain stable.” If that’s really Hillary’s perspective, it constitutes an utter repudiation of the Obama administration’s. And it means that her position is now almost identical to that of Rubio, the man most likely to be her general election opponent, who said last May, “I don’t think the conditions exist for” a Palestinian state “today.”

Hawkish stance

One can defend Hillary’s new point of view. After all, the Middle East is more chaotic than it was during her husband’s administration. Harder to defend is her almost total refusal to publicly acknowledge Palestinian rights and dignity. In her Middle East policy speech at the Brookings Institution two months ago, Hillary mentioned Israel 40 times and the Palestinians not once. She referred to Hamas three times but never mentioned the people of Gaza. The “national security” section of her campaign website mentions Israel five times and the Palestinians none. Even when her website endorses two states, the Palestinians are absent. Hillary, the site promises, will “partner with Israel to advance the two-state vision of a Jewish and democratic Israel with secure and recognized borders.” There’s no reference to working with Palestinians, or fulfilling their aspirations.

Hillary’s response to the rising violence in Israel has been to declare herself “alarmed by the recent wave of attacks against Israelis … Men and women living in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere cannot carry groceries or travel to prayer without looking over their shoulder.” Reading the statement, you wouldn’t know a single Palestinian had died.


It’s a far cry from Obama, who in “The Audacity of Hope” affirmed the common, and equal, humanity of both Palestinians and Jews. “Traveling through Israel and the West Bank,” he wrote, “I talked to Jews who’d lost parents in the Holocaust and brothers in suicide bombings; I heard Palestinians talk of the indignities of checkpoints and reminisce about the land they had lost. I flew by helicopter across the line separating the two peoples and found myself unable to distinguish Jewish towns from Arab towns, all of them like fragile outposts against the green and stony hills.”


When Obama travelled to Israel in 2013, he affirmed Palestinian humanity again. He asked his mostly Jewish Israeli audience to “Put yourself in their [the Palestinians’] shoes. Look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own. Living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements not just of those young people but their parents, their grandparents, every single day.”


Why won’t Hillary say anything like this? Partly, I suspect, it’s because her overall foreign policy outlook is simply more hawkish. Obama is the first American president with a deep experience of the developing world. He also became an adult after Vietnam, and was thus less scarred by the experience of seeing Democrats lose elections for being too dovish. Hillary, by contrast, had a far more conventional upbringing in a mostly white, middle class suburb of Chicago. While in law school, she worked on the campaign of George McGovern, who denounced the Vietnam War as immoral, and lost 49 states. Then, in her husband’s administration, she became a booster of military force in Bosnia and Kosovo. Israel isn’t the only issue on which she has leaned away from Obama and toward the GOP. In 2002, she backed the Iraq War. Like John McCain, she’s demanding a no-fly zone in Syria now.


The Democratic shift

But the irony of Hillary’s current stance is that while she’s drifting toward Netanyahu, ordinary Democrats are drifting away from him. Between early 2014 and early 2015, according to Gallup, the percentage of Democrats who said they identified more with Israelis than Palestinians dropped 10 points. A Pew Research Center poll last March found that while Republicans have an overwhelmingly favorable opinion of Netanyahu, Democrats view him negatively by a margin of two to one. Among liberal Democrats, who play a disproportionate role in the primary process, it’s three to one.
This shift is part of a larger ideological and cultural change. The Democratic Party, which once had a strong working class white base, is increasingly dominated by minorities, professionals and the secular young, who tend to distrust nationalism, military force and conservative religion, all of which Americans identify with Israel. On almost every domestic issue – from crime to guns to Wall Street to the environment – this new coalition is pushing Hillary to the left. Yet on Israel, so far, it’s giving her a total pass.

That’s partly because most Democrats just don’t care that much about Israel. Except when Americans are dying overseas, voters as a whole – and liberals in particular – mostly focus on the domestic concerns that affect them day-to-day. The Democrats who do care most about Israel, and who have the resources to get a candidates’ ear, are people like Haim Saban, the hawkish billionaire who helps fund Hillary’s campaigns.


But anti-Netanyahu Democrats would care more if they had a presidential candidate who did. Instead, they have Bernie Sanders, who has drawn huge crowds talking about income inequality and financial corruption, but talks as little as possible about the Jewish state. Unlike Hillary, Sanders does acknowledge Palestinian suffering. His website calls on Israel to “end the blockade of Gaza, and cease developing settlements on Palestinian land.” But Sanders gives entire speeches without mentioning anything having to do with foreign policy. Until September, his campaign website didn’t say anything about it at all.


Sanders’ relative silence is something of a mystery. Despite being Jewish and having reportedly spent time early in life on a kibbutz, he doesn’t express much concern about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And until recently, as an obscure senator from a liberal and not very Jewish state, he didn’t need to. But the consequences of this idiosyncrasy are quite large. If Sanders challenged Hillary on Israel, many liberal activists would back him, thus pressuring her to halt her rightward drift. In a Democratic primary, holding the same position as Marco Rubio isn’t easy to defend. If Sanders made Israel-Palestine an issue, he might at least force Hillary to distinguish herself from the GOP and restate her commitment to a Palestinian state. Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe he will.

The harsh truth, therefore, is that the next president will almost certainly care less about the Palestinians than the current one. And when it comes to progress toward basic rights for the millions of people who live without citizenship and the right to vote under Israeli authority today, even this current president has accomplished almost nothing.

Is it any wonder why the Palestinians have given up on the United States?

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry Into Islam's Obscure Origins by Robert Spencer, ISI Books

Image result for Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry Into Islam's Obscure Origins
Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry Into Islam's Obscure Origins by Robert Spencer, ISI Books
   
“Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam’s Obscure Origins”.

Imagine if the entire premise that a comprehensive religious, legal, political, social, cultural, and dietary system was based was completely and utterly false.

Robert Spencer’s groundbreaking blockbuster book, Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam’s Obscure Origins is a game-changer of incomprehensible proportions. It shatters every conventional and accepted myth on the history of Muhammad and Islam. Is it any wonder that Islamic supremacists want to squash it?

The Hamas-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) already succeeded in getting his talk on the book in New York canceled, but it was held last Tuesday in another location, with four times the audience that it was projected to have before CAIR protested. It was a good sign: people are tired of CAIR’s attempts to shut down free speech and quash the truth about Islam and enforce the blasphemy laws under Sharia.

They fear Spencer’s new book. This is the first popular book to show all the many holes and inconsistencies and contradictions in the standard story of the life of Muhammad, the development of the Qur’an, and the early years of Islam. Did Muhammad Exist? is going to surprise a lot of people, including non-Muslims who assume that there must have been a man named Muhammad who claimed that he was a prophet of Allah, even if they don’t accept his claim. But Spencer shows here that even though Muhammad is supposed to have died in 632, and the Arab conquests of the Middle East and North Africa started shortly after that – supposedly inspired by Muhammad and the Qur’an – we don’t start hearing about either one, or anything about Islam at all, until much later, in the 690s. No one, not the people the Arabs conquered nor the Arabs themselves, ever mentions Muhammad or the Qur’an, or even calls the conquerors Muslims, for six decades after the conquests began.


Think about that. That would be like the Nazis overrunning Europe in the early days of World War II, but the Poles and French and the Germans themselves never mentioning Nazism or Hitler or the swastika or Jew-hatred. Or the Islamic jihadists destroying the World Trade Center towers and committing almost 20,000 jihad attacks around the world after that, and no one ever saying a word about Islam or jihad — oh, wait, that is what’s happening.

But when it happened with Muhammad, it was many centuries before political correctness or anything else had put a straitjacket on the freedom of speech. Spencer shows that the best explanation for the total absence of references to Islam, Muhammad or the Qur’an in the first sixty years of what are supposed to be the early days of Islam is simply that those weren’t really the early days of Islam at all: in fact, Spencer shows how Islam was invented later. He explains how the Qur’an, which was supposed to have been complete in 632 and collected together and codified in 653, actually wasn’t in its final form even at the beginning of the eighth century – and that it shows signs of having been put together by a committee that did, in many cases, a very poor editing job of the existing Jewish and Christian materials they were using to fashion a new Arabic “holy book.”

The big question then becomes why Muhammad was invented and the Qur’an put together. Spencer’s answer is that it was all done in the days when religion was the unifying force for empires that were made up of numerous races and ethnicities and nationalities. The Arabs, finding themselves by the end of the seventh century the masters of a new empire, put Islam together out of Jewish and Christian and some pagan materials in order to strengthen and unify the new multinational empire that the Arabs had amassed. What better way to motivate a conquering army than by telling them their murder, mayhem, raping and pillaging is righteous, a religious mandate? It puts a whole new spin on wholesale slaughter.

It’s a provocative thesis with many serious implications. For one thing, it proves that Islam’s political aspects are primary, giving the lie to those in the U.S. and Europe today who assume that Muslims in our countries can easily jettison the political and supremacist aspects of Islam and easily separate the mosque from the state. It shows that anti-Sharia initiatives in the various states are much needed, for they assert the primacy of the U.S. Constitution over what was from its very beginnings a political and supremacist ideology that denies many freedoms we take for granted.

This book could and should be decisive for our national ongoing debate about how to deal with political Islam. If the religious elements of Islam were invented in order to support and strengthen a political agenda, Americans deserve to know that, and should be pressuring our politicians to take proper note of the political and supremacist aspects of Islam.

Did Muhammad Exist? is brilliant, surprising, enlightening, engrossing, and eye-opening. It’s also essential reading for any human being defending freedom.


The War of a Million Cuts: The Struggle against the Deligitimization of Israel and the Jews, and the Growth of New Anti-Semitism Paperback – May 12, 2015 by Manfred Gerstenfeld, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs



The War of a Million Cuts: The Struggle against the Deligitimization of Israel and the Jews, and the Growth of New Anti-Semitism Paperback – May 12, 2015 by Manfred Gerstenfeld, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

Gerstenfeld’s The War Of A Million Cuts and OR How Israel Should Combat Antisemitism

One small paper-cut on a finger is painful and distracting; a million of them inflicted onto one’s entire body surface would be unbearable. And that is what the Jewish People face today — with growing virulence.

Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld has a singular ability to tackle this topic in a way not many others could. He has academic degrees in chemistry, economics, environmental studies and Jewish Studies. With such a broad interdisciplinary background, he brings to the examination of any topic both scientific method and goal-oriented processing of presenting problems. His experience as an economic analyst and consultant for large international and Israeli concerns rested upon and further cemented a holistic approach to problem-solving and most likely a way of thinking that can best be characterized as being “outside the box”.

Gerstenfeld Defines the Problem


The first step in solving a problem is defining it. Is the problem growing antisemitism? Is it reawakening of antisemitism that has lain dormant, in at least part of the world, for a few decades after World War II? Is it the metamorphosis of antisemitism into anti-Israelism? Or are these just facts of life whereby the problem should be defined as the lack of an effective approach to combating antisemitism/anti-Israelism?

Why does this make a difference?

If the problem is antisemitism, then we are going to spend a lot of time studying the issue of antisemitism. If the problem is lack of an effective approach to combating antisemitism, then the focus of our attention is directed toward studying alternative pathways for fighting it. This may seem like a small distinction it seems the time is ripe for a focus on action.




I can make this clearer with a specific example: Defining the problem as antisemitism per se results in forums that come up with the kind of recommendations we find summarized in The Action Plan for Combating Antisemitism in 2013 and Beyond. A distinguished group got together in Jerusalem for three days at the end of May 2013 and drew up recommendations for fighting global antisemitism. I doubt whether action was, in fact, undertaken to any great extent. That is because no overall encompassing strategy was defined with evaluation procedures in place for assessing results and failures. This is a recipe for inaction.




Success in the anti-Israel propaganda war demands a sustainable program with the budget necessary for mobilizing all the resources that can be brought to bear in the international arena in which the war is being waged.

Gerstenfeld’s Recipe for Action




In his Introduction, Gerstenfeld defines the problem when he states:







It is the responsibility of Israel’s government to defend its citizens from all types of attacks. This should be true for the propaganda war – also called “political war” – as well. However, despite the great intensity of this major battle against Israel in the current century, no comprehensive and systematic approach has yet been undertaken by the Israeli government to fight it. (page 14)




And in the final chapter, a blueprint is laid out before us detailing what needs to be done and how to do it in order to successfully overcome our enemies on the propaganda battlefield. No other country is dealing with hate and demonization as Israel is. Therefore, Israel needs to invent something out of nothing, and Israel has proven itself to be quite good at that.




The substance of the book is a treatise on a modern history of antisemitism and conflation of open antisemitism with anti-Israelism, whereby symbols easily recognized as antisemitic have been transformed and used in the demonization of Israel, the Jewish state. The material covers the playing fields in which Israel’s legitimacy is attacked: national and international bodies, academia, the media, faith groups and more. Its impact on Jews in Israel and the Diaspora are examined as is the phenomenon of Jews joining the fight against the Jews. It is a well researched and documented compendium of the contemporary situation.




Each chapter, covering a distinct section of the propaganda war, can stand on its own. In fact, I was unable to read more than one chapter at a time. While I am no stranger to the phenomenon of antisemitism in both its pure and its recent anti-Israel form, I needed time to digest each chapter separately before going on to the next. For many Jews involved in either Jewish community life or some form of pro-Israel activism, the material will not be totally new and will perhaps trigger, as it did for me, memories of personal encounters with antisemitism, making it heavy reading; at the same time, the wealth of information provides a depth of understanding and a wider context within which to comprehend the nature of Jew hatred and battle being waged against us. This context and depth of knowledge is important for each operator in the battle.

Fighting Contemporary Antisemitism — A Proposal







In contrast to extant approaches to fighting antisemitism, characterized by responding to events of the past and present, Gerstenfeld puts forward a structure that would, in addition to this, promote strategy and planning developments that look to the future. This resemblesmilitary strategizing. In fact, he suggests that the body in charge of the anti-Israel propaganda war approach it in the same way as the Israeli security forces are now tackling cyber warfare.




While it may seem natural that the Foreign Ministry and the diplomatic corps engage in this war, our diplomats cannot be involved, according to Gerstenfeld. They have a distinct role to play on the international stage and cannot participate in anything that may negatively affect the relationships they need to build in other nations. The anti-propaganda efforts must be run by professionals who are expert at dealing with an enemy and not with making friends.




The structure of the body fighting antisemitism/anti-Israelism would include three branches, each with its own personnel and tasks. These three branches would be:Research to identify key players in antisemitic propaganda and the means by which they operate, Monitoring to establish a database containing information on all acts of incitement and violence, and Operations to devise campaigns to combat antisemitism and coordinate among those best suited to carry them out.




Gerstenfeld also describes broad strategic principles that should underlie the anti-Israel propaganda war. I will list a few of these:

No more free lunches – every attack will be met by a counter attack.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant – establishment of local blogs would make valuable material available in English and other languages in order to facilitate exposure of anti-Israeli inciters in each locale.

Use clear language – stop referring to the land beyond the armistice lines as “occupied territory” and call it “disputed territory”, call the armistice lines just that, and not borders, refer to Jordan as the first Palestinian state and the current negotiations as considering giving rise to the second (Palestinian Authority-ruled) Palestinian state and possibly a third (Hamas-ruled) Palestinian state.

Expose the lies and manipulations of a small number of big players (journalists, media outlets, politicians, NGOs, church leaders, academics) with the aim of destroying their reputations and many others will think twice before attacking Israel.

Use resources efficiently – select the battles wisely.

Encourage promising individual activists.

Is the Israeli Government Up To This?




In May 2015, Gilad Erdan was appointed Minister of Public Security, Strategic Affairs and Information. He has a budget of about 100 million shekels for the year 2016 and a staff of about 11 people, including office staff and professionals. In December 2015, he appointed Ret. Brig. Gen. Sima Vaknin-Gil as Director-General of the Ministry. With academic degrees in Middle East and National Security Studies, she brings 30 years experience in air force intelligence and ten years as the IDF chief military censor; Vaknin-Gil seems to be the kind of professional Gerstenfeld himself might have chosen to lead the war against demonization of Israel. She certainly can claim to have sufficient background in the kind of military thinking that must be applied to this endeavor.




In his speech at the May 2016 “Stop the Boycott” conference in Jerusalem, Erdan stated that every time Israel has been threatened in the past “we knew how to come together and fight it and we will do so now as well.” He was proud to announce that all government ministries are cooperating with the efforts of his office and that they are in the advanced stages of designing a working strategy.




It even felt to me as if he was paraphrasing Gerstenfeld when he said: “Until now those who delegitimized Israel got away with it. That is about to change – there will be a price to pay.”




At a round table discussion at the same conference, Vaknin-Gil talked about coordinating the activities of all organizations, government and otherwise, so that each contributes what it does best. “We have not succeeded yet in getting our [Israel’s] message across because we do not yet have a unified message.” As a first step in gathering together a team over and above ministry staff, she said that 300 people came forward when a call went out asking for volunteers.




Vaknin-Gil said that antisemitism cannot be overcome if we deal with it on an emotional level. Those who demonize Israel, she said, “operate experientially and emotionally and we will work cognitively.”




If the public is ever made privy to more details about the structure and strategy of the team Erdan and Vaknin-Gil are putting together, we will have an idea how closely they pattern their design along the lines suggested so clearly by Gerstenfeld in the final chapter of The War of a Million Cuts.




Israel has become a world leader in cyber warfare and intelligence. Using the experience gained from our increasing cyber warfare capabilities as an example, Gerstenfeld notes that “offensive” and “defensive” operations have had to be redefined and that organizations formally involved in various seemingly separate areas of activity have become interlinked and are now cross-fertilizing. The same has to happen in order to succeed in the global war against anti-Israelism. The few public remarks I heard on the parts of Erdan and Vaknin-Gil give me confidence that this is the new direction and that they are strongly motivated to take a stand on the international stage, both overtly and covertly.




I can think of no better way to conclude this review than by quoting Gerstenfeld, himself in his penultimate page of this weighty tome. He declares that if the delegitimization process with its million cuts is successful,







. . . it will have an additional consequence. Except for those committing the actual murders, few will feel responsible for what has happened. Not the many enemies who can claim that their individual contribution to the million cuts was insignificant, not the false friends who will say that they did not attack Israel, nor the many bystanders who looked away from the clear genocidal intentions proclaimed in parts of the Muslim world. At the same time, Israel will be accused of being responsible for its own fate because it turned the Palestinians – in reality a crime-permeated populace – into victims. All these lies together may flourish in an increasingly opaque society.




None of this has to happen. There is no reason to be fatalistic unless the present Israeli incompetence in the propaganda war endures. It is not too late to turn the tables on Israel’s enemies. It requires, however, an effort that is radically different from what is taking place at present. (page 406)




Let us hope that Erdan and Vaknin-Gil are making just that effort.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs By Elie Wiesel, Schoken



All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs By Elie Wiesel, Schoken


The Holocaust survivor’s underappreciated journalistic work for ‘The Forverts,’ unearthed—including a dispatch from The Happiest Place on Earth

Twelve years after his liberation from Buchenwald, Elie Wiesel found himself in “the happiest place on earth.” At the time, he was a struggling journalist in New York and worked as the foreign correspondent at the United Nations for the Tel-Aviv-based newspaper Yediot Aharonot. To earn some extra money, Wiesel wrote Yiddish articles in Der Morgen Journal, submitted a 26-chapter serialized novel to Der Amerikaner, and contributed a regular Yiddish column to The Forverts.

But in early 1957, Wiesel was slowly recovering from his injuries after being hit by a car in Manhattan’s Times Square. In an effort to raise his spirits, Wiesel’s editor from Yediot Aharonot Dov Yudkovsky and wife Leah came to America for a visit and as Wiesel would later describe in All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995):

We went to concerts, restaurants. By now I was walking with a cane, which I thought made me look distinguished, but I tired easily. They rented a car and invited me to join them on a six-week cross-country trip, from New York to Los Angeles. Since Dov was my boss I didn’t have to worry about work, so I went. We discovered an America unknown to us, totally different from New York or Washington, which were the only places I knew. Interminable highways disappeared into a blue horizon ringing tall mountains embedded in skies of shifting colors. There were cascading rivers and peaceful brooks, green valleys and yellow hills, violent storms and dramatic sunsets. Never before had I been so close to nature. From the hills of San Francisco we gazed upon small towns floating in the fog as in a dream. In the Rocky Mountains the clouds seemed to wear a crown of snow, to touch it you would have to climb to God’s throne. Enchanting mirages, they are so disconcerting you cannot tell which is close and which is far, which is real and which is not. You have a sense of being present at a re-creation of the world.

Wiesel goes on to describe three stops from his six-week trip: the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and at an American Indian reservation in Arizona, where he met a Holocaust survivor “who made his living as an Indian by day while remaining a Jew by night,” and made a note in his diary: “America is truly a wonderland. Even the Indians speak Yiddish.”

After reading his account, I was intrigued with where else Elie Wiesel might have gone on that six-week-long American road-trip. Upon further research, I was surprised that there wasn’t any further mention of this trip within the vast literature and scholarly discussion that has emerged over the past half-century surrounding Elie Wiesel. While there have been several bibliographies and collections of Wiesel’s articles published over the years, one scholar was honest enough to state that “no attempt was made to list the [Forverts] articles written while Mr. Wiesel was a correspondent.” Nearly all of the scholars who have studied the work of Elie Wiesel over the past half-century have ignored his Yiddish newspaper articles.

The headline from Elie Wiesel’s dispatch from Disneyland in ‘The Forverts,’ 1957. (The Forverts/courtesy YIVO)

Wiesel’s articles in The Forverts are not digitized online and so my first stop was to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research at the Center for Jewish History in New York, where the librarians and staff were of great assistance. After several hours of research, I found all of Wiesel’s articles from his 1957 road-trip. More than a year later and after many dozens of hours spent going through every page ofForverts from the mid-1950s until 1970, I have identified nearly one thousand articles that Wiesel wrote that ranged from works of Jewish literature and new books on the Holocaust, to a look at the religious and cultural events around New York, and meetings with Jewish dignitaries and visiting Israeli politicians. I also found “A Visit to the Wonderful Disneyland.”

Wiesel begins by observing:

I don’t know if a Garden of Eden awaits adults in the hereafter. I do know, though, that there is a Garden of Eden for children here in this life. I know because I myself visited this paradise. I have just returned from there, just passed through its gates, just left the magical kingdom known as Disneyland. And as I bid that kingdom farewell, I understood for the first time the true meaning of the French saying ‘to leave is to die a little’ [partir, c’est mourir un peu]

As the article continues, it reads (as one would expect) like a tourist would describe visiting any new location: “Disneyland is located in California, 30 miles from Los Angeles. And despite the fact that its name does not appear on any official map of California, and certainly not on a map of America, you can go to any travel agency, be it in New York or Paris, in Tel Aviv or Tokyo, in Berlin or Johannesburg, and buy a plane ticket to Disneyland.”

Wiesel the journalist provides the history of Disneyland, as well as some of the (then) contemporary statistics of its daily operation:


Walt Disney officially announced the opening of Disneyland as a children’s world in 1955. The work lasted just over a year: a year and a day. And when you consider the huge undertaking that was completed in the course of such a short span of time, you start to believe that the Master of the Universe could in fact have created the world in just six days. … It’s true that He had no collaborators, but He is still God! Speaking of God, it’s not yet clear to me whether we must thank Him for creating the world and mankind, but I am certain that all children who visit Walt Disney’s paradise will thank Him endlessly for having built Disneyland. Anyway, let us descend once again below God’s heavens and return to our little kingdom. About a thousand people are employed there, taking on various—and rather remarkable—positions as carriage drivers, captains of ships, and pilots of moonplanes. Disneyland has: an orchestra that gives 1,460 concerts a year; 24 restaurants that can serve 8,000 people an hour and sell a million hotdogs a year; its own trains, ships, rivers, police, and fire brigade. A kingdom unto itself—quite literally. A kingdom all of whose citizens are happy; a kingdom that relates, not only to man, but to animals as well, humanely. For instance: Any horse that works in Disneyland may not work more than four hours a day or more than six days a week. In many, many countries, people would die for such working conditions.

From the $1 entrance-fee to Disneyland—in contrast, Disney announced several months a ago that a single-day ticket is now $99—Wiesel takes his reader on a tour around the park, where “before your astonished eyes unfolds a magical realm, where daily worries and troubles have no place.” From Main Street, U.S.A. and Frontierland “as [the Western City] would have looked years ago,” with its “colorful tramways, pulled by horses [that] traverse the main streets; outmoded taxis; affable, smiling policemen turn around, seemingly having just jumped out of a very old film; and just over there is a store where they sell everything from ‘revolvers’ to bags of gold, gifts, and cowboy hats.” He then boards the train “through a desert where skeletons and Indians look at you with their dead stares” before disembarking to get his ticket for the Mark Twain Riverboat and travel down the giant Mississippi River, remarking “the ship is terrific, the river formidable.”

Wiesel finishes his travels through America’s past and heads now to “take a stroll through the land of the future, which is also a province of Disneyland” and describes the (now-closed) House of the Future shortly after it opened in the Summer of 1957: “Futuristic man will live such a wonderful life! Everything will come to him so, so easily! If someone knocks at the door, you won’t have to go to see who it is: He will appear on the screen of your television. If the telephone rings, you’ll be able to see the person you’re speaking with and not just hear his voice. And a thousand other such conveniences will turn your house into a royal palace and transform you yourself into a lazy, fat, lonely king.”

Several times in the article, Wiesel reflects on his appreciation of Walt Disney—“the person who created this land, this universe, must be a genius, a rare genius”—and then shares the anecdote that he was told of how Walt Disney often walks around Disneyland in disguise. Wiesel understands why: “If one wants to calm his nerves and forget the bitter realities of daily life, there is no better-suited place to do so than Disneyland. In Disneyland, the land of children’s dreams, everything is simple, beautiful, good. There, no one screams at his fellow, no one is exploited by his fellow, no one’s fortune derives from his fellow’s misfortune. If children had the right to vote, they would vote Disney their president. And the whole world would look different.”

Wiesel concludes his description of visiting Disneyland with a story from four years earlier, when he was a journalist covering the Cannes Film Festival on the French Riviera and had the opportunity to interview Walt Disney in person after the latter had been awarded the French Légion d’Honneur in honor of his cinematographic contributions. (Wiesel would himself later receive this same award in 1984, two years before he won the Nobel Peace Prize.)

At a ceremony that was flowing with champagne, surrounded by screenwriters, producers, and film personalities from around the world, Elie Wiesel approached Walt Disney and asked: “The whole world loves you; your children’s films have brought you honor, renown, and anything one could wish for. I want to ask you: What is your goal? What do you want—what would you want—to achieve with your film work?”

Wiesel then writes:

“Disney thought for a bit, fixing his large eyes on a far off, invisible point in space, and answered:

‘Childhood. The goal of my work has always been to awaken a sense of youth in men, in adults. Because—the best part of man’s life is his childhood.’ ”

Wiesel’s ending places the Holocaust survivor next to Mickey Mouse, in a way that feels at once jarring and profound and that Walt Disney would certainly have appreciated:

“Difficult as it is to admit, I did not understand his words at the time. I do understand them better now, however, having been to Disneyland.

“Today, I visited not only Disneyland, but also—and especially—my childhood.”

***

All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs By Elie Wiesel, Schoken



All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs By Elie Wiesel, Schoken

The Holocaust survivor’s underappreciated journalistic work for ‘The Forverts,’ unearthed—including a dispatch from The Happiest Place on Earth

The Holocaust survivor’s underappreciated journalistic work for ‘The Forverts,’ unearthed—including a dispatch from The Happiest Place on Earth

Twelve years after his liberation from Buchenwald, Elie Wiesel found himself in “the happiest place on earth.” At the time, he was a struggling journalist in New York and worked as the foreign correspondent at the United Nations for the Tel-Aviv-based newspaper Yediot Aharonot. To earn some extra money, Wiesel wrote Yiddish articles in Der Morgen Journal, submitted a 26-chapter serialized novel to Der Amerikaner, and contributed a regular Yiddish column to The Forverts.

But in early 1957, Wiesel was slowly recovering from his injuries after being hit by a car in Manhattan’s Times Square. In an effort to raise his spirits, Wiesel’s editor from Yediot Aharonot Dov Yudkovsky and wife Leah came to America for a visit and as Wiesel would later describe in All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995):

We went to concerts, restaurants. By now I was walking with a cane, which I thought made me look distinguished, but I tired easily. They rented a car and invited me to join them on a six-week cross-country trip, from New York to Los Angeles. Since Dov was my boss I didn’t have to worry about work, so I went. We discovered an America unknown to us, totally different from New York or Washington, which were the only places I knew. Interminable highways disappeared into a blue horizon ringing tall mountains embedded in skies of shifting colors. There were cascading rivers and peaceful brooks, green valleys and yellow hills, violent storms and dramatic sunsets. Never before had I been so close to nature. From the hills of San Francisco we gazed upon small towns floating in the fog as in a dream. In the Rocky Mountains the clouds seemed to wear a crown of snow, to touch it you would have to climb to God’s throne. Enchanting mirages, they are so disconcerting you cannot tell which is close and which is far, which is real and which is not. You have a sense of being present at a re-creation of the world.

Wiesel goes on to describe three stops from his six-week trip: the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and at an American Indian reservation in Arizona, where he met a Holocaust survivor “who made his living as an Indian by day while remaining a Jew by night,” and made a note in his diary: “America is truly a wonderland. Even the Indians speak Yiddish.”

After reading his account, I was intrigued with where else Elie Wiesel might have gone on that six-week-long American road-trip. Upon further research, I was surprised that there wasn’t any further mention of this trip within the vast literature and scholarly discussion that has emerged over the past half-century surrounding Elie Wiesel. While there have been several bibliographies and collections of Wiesel’s articles published over the years, one scholar was honest enough to state that “no attempt was made to list the [Forverts] articles written while Mr. Wiesel was a correspondent.” Nearly all of the scholars who have studied the work of Elie Wiesel over the past half-century have ignored his Yiddish newspaper articles.

The headline from Elie Wiesel’s dispatch from Disneyland in ‘The Forverts,’ 1957. (The Forverts/courtesy YIVO)

Wiesel’s articles in The Forverts are not digitized online and so my first stop was to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research at the Center for Jewish History in New York, where the librarians and staff were of great assistance. After several hours of research, I found all of Wiesel’s articles from his 1957 road-trip. More than a year later and after many dozens of hours spent going through every page ofForverts from the mid-1950s until 1970, I have identified nearly one thousand articles that Wiesel wrote that ranged from works of Jewish literature and new books on the Holocaust, to a look at the religious and cultural events around New York, and meetings with Jewish dignitaries and visiting Israeli politicians. I also found “A Visit to the Wonderful Disneyland.”

Wiesel begins by observing:

I don’t know if a Garden of Eden awaits adults in the hereafter. I do know, though, that there is a Garden of Eden for children here in this life. I know because I myself visited this paradise. I have just returned from there, just passed through its gates, just left the magical kingdom known as Disneyland. And as I bid that kingdom farewell, I understood for the first time the true meaning of the French saying ‘to leave is to die a little’ [partir, c’est mourir un peu]

As the article continues, it reads (as one would expect) like a tourist would describe visiting any new location: “Disneyland is located in California, 30 miles from Los Angeles. And despite the fact that its name does not appear on any official map of California, and certainly not on a map of America, you can go to any travel agency, be it in New York or Paris, in Tel Aviv or Tokyo, in Berlin or Johannesburg, and buy a plane ticket to Disneyland.”

Wiesel the journalist provides the history of Disneyland, as well as some of the (then) contemporary statistics of its daily operation:


Walt Disney officially announced the opening of Disneyland as a children’s world in 1955. The work lasted just over a year: a year and a day. And when you consider the huge undertaking that was completed in the course of such a short span of time, you start to believe that the Master of the Universe could in fact have created the world in just six days. … It’s true that He had no collaborators, but He is still God! Speaking of God, it’s not yet clear to me whether we must thank Him for creating the world and mankind, but I am certain that all children who visit Walt Disney’s paradise will thank Him endlessly for having built Disneyland. Anyway, let us descend once again below God’s heavens and return to our little kingdom. About a thousand people are employed there, taking on various—and rather remarkable—positions as carriage drivers, captains of ships, and pilots of moonplanes. Disneyland has: an orchestra that gives 1,460 concerts a year; 24 restaurants that can serve 8,000 people an hour and sell a million hotdogs a year; its own trains, ships, rivers, police, and fire brigade. A kingdom unto itself—quite literally. A kingdom all of whose citizens are happy; a kingdom that relates, not only to man, but to animals as well, humanely. For instance: Any horse that works in Disneyland may not work more than four hours a day or more than six days a week. In many, many countries, people would die for such working conditions.

From the $1 entrance-fee to Disneyland—in contrast, Disney announced several months a ago that a single-day ticket is now $99—Wiesel takes his reader on a tour around the park, where “before your astonished eyes unfolds a magical realm, where daily worries and troubles have no place.” From Main Street, U.S.A. and Frontierland “as [the Western City] would have looked years ago,” with its “colorful tramways, pulled by horses [that] traverse the main streets; outmoded taxis; affable, smiling policemen turn around, seemingly having just jumped out of a very old film; and just over there is a store where they sell everything from ‘revolvers’ to bags of gold, gifts, and cowboy hats.” He then boards the train “through a desert where skeletons and Indians look at you with their dead stares” before disembarking to get his ticket for the Mark Twain Riverboat and travel down the giant Mississippi River, remarking “the ship is terrific, the river formidable.”

Wiesel finishes his travels through America’s past and heads now to “take a stroll through the land of the future, which is also a province of Disneyland” and describes the (now-closed) House of the Future shortly after it opened in the Summer of 1957: “Futuristic man will live such a wonderful life! Everything will come to him so, so easily! If someone knocks at the door, you won’t have to go to see who it is: He will appear on the screen of your television. If the telephone rings, you’ll be able to see the person you’re speaking with and not just hear his voice. And a thousand other such conveniences will turn your house into a royal palace and transform you yourself into a lazy, fat, lonely king.”

Several times in the article, Wiesel reflects on his appreciation of Walt Disney—“the person who created this land, this universe, must be a genius, a rare genius”—and then shares the anecdote that he was told of how Walt Disney often walks around Disneyland in disguise. Wiesel understands why: “If one wants to calm his nerves and forget the bitter realities of daily life, there is no better-suited place to do so than Disneyland. In Disneyland, the land of children’s dreams, everything is simple, beautiful, good. There, no one screams at his fellow, no one is exploited by his fellow, no one’s fortune derives from his fellow’s misfortune. If children had the right to vote, they would vote Disney their president. And the whole world would look different.”

Wiesel concludes his description of visiting Disneyland with a story from four years earlier, when he was a journalist covering the Cannes Film Festival on the French Riviera and had the opportunity to interview Walt Disney in person after the latter had been awarded the French Légion d’Honneur in honor of his cinematographic contributions. (Wiesel would himself later receive this same award in 1984, two years before he won the Nobel Peace Prize.)

At a ceremony that was flowing with champagne, surrounded by screenwriters, producers, and film personalities from around the world, Elie Wiesel approached Walt Disney and asked: “The whole world loves you; your children’s films have brought you honor, renown, and anything one could wish for. I want to ask you: What is your goal? What do you want—what would you want—to achieve with your film work?”

Wiesel then writes:

“Disney thought for a bit, fixing his large eyes on a far off, invisible point in space, and answered:

‘Childhood. The goal of my work has always been to awaken a sense of youth in men, in adults. Because—the best part of man’s life is his childhood.’ ”

Wiesel’s ending places the Holocaust survivor next to Mickey Mouse, in a way that feels at once jarring and profound and that Walt Disney would certainly have appreciated:

“Difficult as it is to admit, I did not understand his words at the time. I do understand them better now, however, having been to Disneyland.

“Today, I visited not only Disneyland, but also—and especially—my childhood.”

***

Monday, June 27, 2016



In defense of book collecting


A small selection of the nearly 1.800 books in Michael Robbins' collection. (Michael Robbins photo)
Michael Robbins



As of this writing there are 1,790 books in my apartment, some couple hundred in my campus office, and an unknown number floating about on loan to various friends and students. This represents a decrease of probably 20 percent from the height of my mania. Over the past few years, I have embarked on culling operations, boxing up hundreds of books and carting them to used bookstores. Spilling off shelves, piled in tottering stacks on every flat surface and a few angular ones, the books are snowing me under.

Please do not think I make a habit of counting my books. I just did it for this piece, it took forever and I do not intend ever to count even one book again.

Even after my latest and severest cull, I own three translations of "War and Peace," a book I read about 150 pages of in high school and never opened again. "Some day!" the sirens sing to the book collector.

Algren Award? Lee Conell had a 'Lock' on it

I have six different editions of John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," and three editions each of his "Rivers and Mountains," "Three Poems" and "As We Know." I have a first edition of Wallace Stevens' "Transport to Summer" previously owned by Wallace Stevens. I have a copy of Louis Zukofsky's "All" from the library of poet Robert Creeley.
Promoted Stories from the Chatter Network

29 stars who married ordinary people
CelebChatter

The original ‘Ghostbusters’ cast, then and now
CelebChatter

Do you remember these songs of the summer?
CelebChatter

My oldest book is an original copy of the 1637 Scottish Book of Common Prayer, its pages too brittle to turn; my second oldest is a late edition of the first volume of Samuel Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," printed in 1783 and re-bound in the 19th century. (Both of these were gifts from the poet Anthony Madrid.) My newest book is Virginia Heffernan's "Magic and Loss," published this month, for which I penned a blurb that appears on the back cover.

Many of my books have been written in, by me, or previous owners, or friends who gave them to me. My hardcover of Nietzsche's "Basic Writings" cost me $6 when I bought it used for a college course in 1992. It's marked up, like the older of my two editions of "Ulysses," with inane undergraduate ejaculations and exclamation points, as well as notes taken during class ("not the simple refutation of idealism it first appears"; "all moralities heretofore have been denominational"). My copy of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's "Ecrits" dates to graduate school; its marginalia are frequently incomprehensible. Some books were written by friends of mine, who inscribed them to me in hands of diverse legibility and steadiness.

But most of my books are not particularly storied. Ordinary paperbacks, pristine, dog-eared, dusty, much-thumbed. My building manager asks, when he comes to fix something, whether I've read them all. "Not yet," I say.

Chicken guns and Kevlar underwear: Mary Roach finds funny side of military research

I know I have been marching up and down the ranks of my books "to pass them in review before a friendly audience," a noxious exercise to which Walter Benjamin, in "Unpacking My Library," promises he will not subject his readers. "Would it not be presumptuous of me," he asks, if "I enumerated for you the main sections or prize pieces of a library — if I presented you with their history, or even their usefulness to a writer?" He says he's interested in how one collects books, in how they become part of a collection, not in which books one collects.

But in the course of describing the art of acquisition, Benjamin enumerates quite a few prize pieces of his library, and presents their history.

To this day, Balzac's Peau de chagrin stands out from long rows of French volumes in my library as a memento of my exciting experience at an auction. This happened in 1915 at the Rumann auction put up by Emil Hirsh, one of the greatest of book experts and most distinguished of dealers. The edition in question appeared in 1838 in Paris, place de la Bourse. As I pick up my copy, I see not only its number in the Rumann Collection, but even the label of the shop in which the first owner bought the book more than ninety years ago, for one-eightieth of today's price. "Papeterie I. Flanneau," it says. A fine age in which it was still possible to buy such a deluxe edition at a stationery dealer's!

A fine age, indeed (except for all the political horrors Benjamin analyzed elsewhere with such ferocity). I can't remember where or when I bought most of my books, especially now that I order most of them online.

Benjamin cheerfully admits the bourgeois drift of his passion. It would be pointless to dodge: book-collecting is self-evidently based in acquisitiveness, the desire to possess, to own. It was on the way out, even in 1931. He declines to mourn the passing of the figure he has so lovingly limned in his own person, but he refuses to condemn him. (And this is where I decline to construct some phony argument for or against e-books.)

When I ask myself why I collect books, I think of a review Benjamin published in 1930 in which he imagines the writer as "a ragpicker, at daybreak, picking up rags of speech and verbal scraps with his stick and tossing them, grumbling and growling, a little drunk, into his cart." It is always daybreak somewhere along my shelves.

Since I began writing this, I have obtained a copy of Silvia Federici's "Caliban and the Witch," and Madrid, in some mania of generosity, has sent me the two volumes of the eighth edition of Samuel Johnson's "Dictionary of the English Language," printed in 1799, which he purchased at a book sale in New York City several years ago for far less than their listed price of $1,100.

That's 1,793 — and not counting.

Thursday, June 23, 2016

The Industries of the Future by Alec J. Ross



The Industries of the Future by Alec J. Ross ,Hardcover320 pages
Published February 2nd 2016 by Simon & Schuster (first published October 13th 2015)

Leading innovation expert Alec Ross explains what’s next for the world: the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next ten years, and how we can navigate them.

While Alec Ross was working as Senior Advisor for Innovation to the Secretary of State, he traveled to forty-one countries, exploring the latest advances coming out of every continent. From startup hubs in Kenya to R&D labs in South Korea, Ross has seen what the future holds.

In The Industries of the Future, Ross shows us what changes are coming in the next ten years, highlighting the best opportunities for progress and explaining why countries thrive or sputter. He examines the specific fields that will most shape our economic future, including robotics, cybersecurity, the commercialization of genomics, the next step for big data, and the coming impact of digital technology on money and markets.

In each of these realms, Ross addresses the toughest questions: How will we adapt to the changing nature of work? Is the prospect of cyberwar sparking the next arms race? How can the world’s rising nations hope to match Silicon Valley in creating their own innovation hotspots? And what can today’s parents do to prepare their children for tomorrow?

Ross blends storytelling and economic analysis to give a vivid and informed perspective on how sweeping global trends are affecting the ways we live. Incorporating the insights of leaders ranging from tech moguls to defense experts, The Industries of the Future takes the intimidating, complex topics that many of us know to be important and boils them down into clear, plainspoken language. This is an essential book for understanding how the world works—now and tomorrow—and a must-read for businesspeople in every sector, from every country.
Hardcover320 pages
Published February 2nd 2016 by Simon & Schuster (first published October 13th 2015)