A tale of two books
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. So wrote Dickens in his Tale of Two Cities. He went on to add it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; and so it is today. Two books appeared in 2021 exemplifying this truth: Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews and Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus. They could not be more different, though both address the issue of the contemporary face of anti-Semitism.
First Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews, a collection of essays that include reflections on the way Holocaust memorialization tends to blot out the brutal fact that we are talking about six million dead Jews deliberately annihilated, by focusing on the universal message which the Holocaust ‘teaches’ us. Quoting Frank’s famous line about still believing people are truly good at heart, Horn points out that people latch on to this part of the story because it brings them the gift of grace and absolution. And yet, the author reminds us, Anne Frank wrote those words three weeks before meeting people who weren’t at all good at heart. The author goes on to say: “Here’s how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them. This fact bears repeating, as it does not come up at all in Anne Frank’s writings. Readers of her diary are aware that the author was murdered in a genocide; but this does not mean that her diary is a work about genocide. If it were, it is unlikely that it would have been anywhere near as universally embraced. We know this,” she goes on to write, “because there is no shortage of writings from victims and survivors who chronicled this fact in vivid detail, and none of these documents have achieved anything like Frank’s diary’s fame.”
One of the documents she writes about is the chronicle written by a young murdered Jew, Zalmen Gradowski, written in Auschwitz and discovered after his death. I myself had not before heard of this young man or of his diary which, from the little Horn quotes from it, is an unflinchingly graphic depiction of the murder of Jews that went on at that concentration camp. Horn sums up the significance of his work thus: “Gradowski was not poetic; he was prophetic. He did not gaze into the inferno and ask why. He knew. Aware of both the long recurring arc of destruction in Jewish history, and of the universal fact of cruelty’s origins in feelings of worthlessness, he writes: “This fire was ignited long ago by the barbarians of the world, who had hoped to drive darkness from their brutal lives with its light.”
She then goes on to discuss different manifestations of this recurring arc: the once thriving Jewish community of Harbin, China, now fossilized and frozen into a weird museum after having been decimated by the Soviets, the Fascists, the Japanese and the Maoists; the vicious murder of so many of Soviet Jewry, many of whose members had embraced the Communist utopia and died with their souls destroyed because they had participated in a system which forced them “to internalize their own humiliation”; the startling idea that Jewish stories do not have endings, let alone happy endings, but simply stop, because they are stories about “human limitations, which means that the stories are not endings but beginnings, the beginning of the search for meaning rather than the end – and the power of resilience and endurance to carry through to that meaning.” Jewish stories, she adds, are not there “to teach us about the beauty of the world and the wonders of redemption” because that is not the Jewish experience; but it is what dead Jews are for, she suggests.
Horn has a fascinating essay on the fact that American Jews did not have their names changed at Ellis Island, but changed them themselves in order to facilitate their children’s lives in the New World which was supposed to be free of anti-Semitism but wasn’t. When she explains this to American Jewish audiences they cannot believe her, in part because the resurgence of anti-Semitism in America in recent years contradicts the story American Jews have told themselves for generations, namely that America has always been welcoming to Jews. I suspect the refusal of Jews to abandon the Democratic Party even though it now has overt anti-Semites in its ranks who, like FDR refusing to bomb the train lines to Auschwitz, also have other priorities, can be traced to this elision in Jewish memory. So too her wonderful biography of Varian Fry, a man who rescued so many European artists, Jews among them, from the Nazis, who died ignored and abandoned by many of the people he saved. A difficult man to work with, many attested, but Horn points out that Fry was singular in another respect. He hated what Hitler stood for long before others did as he hated what Stalin did when others did not, and he regretted all the people he did not save, all the people who did not embody the culture of Europe but did embody the culture of Jews. “No one tried to save the culture of Hasidism, for example, with its devotion to ordinary, everyday holiness – or Misnagdism,” she wrote, thinking of the prophetic nature of Fry’s personality which made him truly righteous, refusing to leave when the bureaucrats wanted him to shut down his rescue mission in Vichy France. And so she concludes “that perhaps what should have been saved was not more of the culture of Europe, but more people like Varian Fry.”
A reflection on Diarna, the virtual museum of Jewish heritage places in the Middle East and North Africa, reminds Horn of the expulsion of nearly a million Jews from communities in which they lived for thousands of years; and the memory stirs in her and in the reader the anxiety that such could be the fate of the Jews in the West too. No sooner had the Holocaust finished than the Muslim Arab world sought to pick up the baton with nary a word of protest from the so-called international community, today more worried about Israeli settlements than Arab Muslim blood lust bent on liquidating the Jewish state. She seeks a more uplifting meaning for the search to preserve a liquidated past. “All of us will die; all of our memories will be lost,” she muses. But then she also thinks that this work of digital preservation is also “humbling, shocking – like seeing a dead relative in a dream. The past is alive, trembling in the present.” And I can only think: people love dead Jews.
Then comes the author’s meditation on a blockbuster Auschwitz exhibition mounted by a Spanish company, Musealia. Faultless in the details it covers, it also has the paradoxical effect of suggesting that anything short of the Holocaust is somehow not so bad. Shooting Jews in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, assaulting Jews in Chicago and New York, lobbing missiles at sleeping children in Israel’s Kiryat Gat and harassing Jewish college students is, after all, nothing like what the exhibition describes in gruesome detail. And telling people in a show at the end that in the end people need to love one another is another sleight of hand that turns Jews into a metaphor and the Holocaust into a teaching moment. But the author wisely reminds us that the Holocaust did not happen “because of a lack of love. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own problems, and instead blamed them on the people who represented – have always represented, since they first introduced the idea of commandments to the world – the thing they were most afraid of: responsibility.” What, this reader asks himself, has changed?
If the arc of destruction in Jewish history has not been underscored enough, the author next turns her attention to Shakespeare’s Shylock, only to discover that her love for literature had led her too to accept the unstated assumption that Jews are revolting, beyond the pale, and hence deserving of the humiliation that the Christians in the play do not receive. It took her ten-year-old son to point out that nothing Shakespeare does can camouflage the degrading hideousness of the character he created. Her epiphany is followed by the last essay in the book, one in which she rails against the contextualization offered by news outlets in their reporting of an attack by two black American assailants on Hasidic Jews in Jersey City. Not only was the “context,” supposed to explain and hence somehow justify the attacks, presented by journalists false; it played into the presumption that the Hasidic Jews must have done something to deserve the assault they endured, so manifestly reprehensible in their black and distinctive clothing and their unfashionable hats. Like Shylock, the reader realizes. Like the ostjuden in post-World War One Germany. But not like the victims in any other hate-crime attacks in contemporary America, where “context” was never evoked to “explain” what happened to them. Subsequent attacks on Jews occurred and other contexts were provided by media outlets. Panic, she noted, hit the American Jewish community from every point on the political spectrum. But when the author was asked to write about these events she could not bring herself to do so. “Was I really going to expend energy delineating why this wasn’t like the Third Reich” the author asks, “but perhaps resembled, say, second-century Egypt or tenth century Spain? To what end? To reassure everyone that “only” a few Jews were actually maimed or dead, so everything was cool? Nitpicking over sloppy historical analogies was a convenient distraction. The fact was that a communal memory of multiple millennia had been activated, and it was deep and real.”
Much the same could be said by any intelligent sociologically and historically aware Jew, when reading the daily commentary on Israel that streams forth from the mouths and pens of political leaders, journalists, pundits, and professors. As the author herself wrote, after a brief period when anti-Semitism was socially unacceptable, the old normal of hating Jews was coming back. And so instead of following the news the author started following the Talmud, joining Daf Yomi discussion groups engaged in daily Talmud study, one page per day, in pursuit of memory and integrity. I found myself understanding completely. Having thought that trying to explain over and over to people the inadequacy of the way they understand the world, Israel included, was a worthwhile endeavour, that good sociology could defeat bad sociology, only to find that their moral prejudices invariably trumped their cognitive abilities, I too said to myself it were perhaps best to trade in sociology for the ancient Hebrew texts and pick up the one I had never really studied, the Talmud. People really do love dead Jews; why not read what they once said? But being a literature hound, I still frequent libraries, and at my local one found a book about which I had heard and read offered for free as part of a writers’ festival. I picked it up, brought it home, and started to read The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen. I couldn’t have been more disgusted.
As the subtitle of the book states, it is “an account of a minor and ultimately even negligible episode in the life of a very famous family.” By the end the reader wonders why bother to have written it if the account is so minor and even negligible? The answer to that question is rather disturbing.
The narrator of the story is one Ruben Blum, a Jew and an historian specializing in American economic history, notably taxation. He is a professor at a small college in upstate New York. He is also the only Jew in his department, originally from the Bronx in New York City, married to Edith and father to their daughter Judy. The negligible episode he recounts starts in the fall term of 1959 and ends in the winter semester of 1960. One gets the impression that Professor Blum is not quite comfortable being the only Jew in his department. There are slights that he experiences as possible indications of anti-Semitism, which he parries with a blend of intellectual irony and self-deprecation. This unease is reflected in his personal life. His wife has a job at the college library that does not use all her talents. His daughter is brilliant but unhappy, especially at what she considers her too ungainly Jewish nose. They have stopped returning to New York for the Jewish holidays, so Edith’s parents come for the Jewish New Year in September. The description of their visit tells the reader that here too Ruben feels somewhat belittled, no match for his in-laws’ wealth and worldliness.
His parents, we learn a few chapters later, come for Thanksgiving, but the visit is no more successful. Ruben’s father, a refugee from Soviet communism, has no reservations about treating his son’s daughter to some old-fashioned wisdom. No need to change your nose, he tells his granddaughter in so many words, whose subtext is no need to apologize for being Jewish. Judy is not convinced and plans an accident to her nose caused by her grandfather when he tries to say goodbye to her. Her nose gets broken so severely she needs reconstructive surgery, thereby enabling her to get the nose she wants. While she recovers from her operation, her father, Professor Blum, has to compose her letters of application to the Ivy League colleges for which he thinks she is destined, although the chair of his department lets him know he expects Judy to attend their institution of higher learning.
While all this is going on Blum’s department chair, one Dr. Morse, informs him he has been selected to sit on the hiring committee to vet the application of one Ben-Zion Netanyahu for a joint appointment in History and Bible Studies. Furthermore, he is tasked with welcoming and showing Netanyahu around when he comes for his interview. The reference letters for the candidate Blum receives are not uniformly positive. Both his American sponsor and Israeli colleague paint a picture of a man whose scholarship was bound up with his political activism as Jabotinsly’s right-hand man in America, whose brilliance was linked to his bristling personality, whose historical work on the Jews of Iberia was daringly innovative but also dubious. Israel, America, Zionism and the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust (not to forget anti-Semitism) were all thrown in to these letters, which themselves became lessons in those subjects and discourses on history itself.
When the aspiring candidate shows up for his interview, which includes a sample lecture, all hell breaks loose. The Netanyahus arrive in a broken-down car in the middle of a snowstorm. Ben-Zion shows up not only with his wife, but also with his three children. The inn at which a room was reserved for them has no room for the youngsters, so the entire family winds up bunking down at the Blums. The children are depicted as intelligent but undisciplined brats. Their parents are not much better; husband and wife are constantly bickering. Ben-Zion himself is presented as domineering, unpolished and self-centred, though his commentary on various subjects is incisive, formally polite and brutally frank. In his interviews with his colleagues and also in his public lecture, he expounds his revisionist theories. The Spanish Jews were not persecuted by the Church for refusing to convert to Catholicism; they were hounded by the crown for having converted when they should not have because their blood did not permit it. This, Netanyahu senior explained, was part of the crown’s attempt to subdue the nobility who needed Jewish professionals, even converted Jewish professionals, to oversee and bolster their wealth. In the process the Iberian royals were the first to treat the Jews as a race, and not a religious group.
In a Bible class at the Seminary, he argued as if it were incontrovertible truth that two thousand years of living in the Diaspora under the arbitrary rule of others turned Jews into a poetic rather than a historical people, but the re-emergence of Israel as the Jewish state put an end to this process. “Now that Israel exists, however,” the author has him say, “the days of the Bible tales are finished, and the true history of my people can finally begin and if any Jewish Question still remains to be answered it’s whether my people have the ability or appetite to tell the difference.” Back at the History Department, however, Ben-Zion expostulated to his potential colleagues when asked about revisionism that the word had no meaning, just as the word Jew has none except in its fungible capacity to be used and abused and hurled at anyone and anything. “Revisionist and Jewish: both descriptors do much, though ultimately they might describe nothing at all save the intolerance of the person who speaks them.” The reader cannot fail to notice that Ben-Zion thus skewers his host’s colleagues on their anti-Semitism in a way Blum himself would never dare, and perhaps never wishes, though Blum’s own father would probably approve. At his public lecture he expounded his ideas even further, which the author has Blum imagining is directed to him, telling him that “the only way out of gentile history was through Zion,” and suggesting that his life in America was a fraud because it robbed him and his family of the core identity which all empires ultimately fail to provide. At which point Netanyahu’s public lecture is turned into an indictment of American democracy, setting the tone for the contemporary debate raging among American Jews, or haunting them at least.
The reader too feels torn, but the novel does not end there. It ends when the adults – the Netanyahus and the Blums – return to the Blums’ house only to find the place in shambles. The prized new television has been overturned and broken. The youngest Netanyahu son is asleep beneath it. Benjamin, the second boy, is crouched at the top of the stairs, guarding the door to Judy’s bedroom. When he sees the adults he shouts a warning to his older brother, who bolts butt naked out of the room and the two brothers take off into the snow outside. The police are called. The boys are found. The Netanyahu family leaves, and Blum is escorted home to the sheriff’s exasperation at “those fucking people” whom Blum tells him were Turks.
If the novel stopped there one might say it confirms Horn’s contention that Jewish stories simply stop with no happy ending. But the author feels impelled to add an afterword he calls Credits & Extra Credit, in which we learn that the novel is based on a story the author heard from the celebrated literary critic and Yale professor of English literature Harold Bloom, who himself, so we are told, once hosted Ben-Zion Netanyahu and his family for a job interview. How loosely the author played with the story Bloom told him in order to write this novel the reader cannot know, but enough details are provided to suggest the story is far from embellishment. That the author took pains to tell us all this may simply be more literary license, but if it is it is bad literary license, designed to add lustre to the description of Netanyahu which the author portrays through the words of the Israeli professor who wrote the novel’s Professor Blum a letter about his prospective candidate. This is what the author Joshua Cohen has his character say about the Ben-Zion Netanyahu in his novel: “I have told you most of what I know and too much of what I think, yet none of it with a sabotage’s intention. I, a refugee, am well aware that a man can change, and that each man contains many men, and that the faces they show can be different; tragic one moment, comedic the next, pitiless, pitiful, bewildered. I hope for your sake that the Netanyahu you meet will be another Netanyahu – I hope he will genuinely be another, bearing no resemblance to the man I have described.” We know from the novel that the Netanyahu Cohen’s Professor Blum meets turns out to be even worse, such that even were we inclined to be in agreement with what he may have to say about Jews and history and America and Zion and the Diaspora, his character would undermine confidence in our assent. To put it bluntly, if the man is such a bastard, how can what he says be right? And if he is not right, neither is his mentor Jabotinsky, whose prescient words (“Eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate you”) constitute the novel’s epigraph. The author clearly would like to have his cake and eat it, America and Israel, and is talented enough to make his Netanyahu at times sympathetic enough to make it seem as if he, the author, is not taking sides in the debate. But all this is simply a smokescreen for a brutal hatchet job, whose main target, I suspect, is not Netanyahu père but Netanyahu fils, the second son who is now Prime Minister of Israel. None of it with a sabotage’s intention? I highly doubt it.
Joshua Cohen is clearly a talented writer, talented enough to present the argument for Revisionist Zionism convincingly while damning it with faint praise. Just as he knows enough to point out the foibles in American democracy while never taking the criticism seriously. Blum himself comes across as someone who will comfort himself with the luxury of mild doubts about his security, his accomplishments, his purpose while betraying his Jewish heritage. To the sheriff he thanks for giving him a lift home he can only murmur his agreement with the officer’s description of the Netanyahus as “those fucking people.” We are supposed to chalk that comment up to the sheriff’s exasperation at the evening’s uproar, but Blum feels impelled to dissociate himself from those fucking Jews. “They’re Turkish, you know,” Blum says, “…just a bunch of crazy Turks.” And there the story stops, leaving us in limbo about what the author really thinks. Is America really dangerous for Jews? Can only Israel put an end to the long recurring arc of destruction in Jewish history?
But if the author truly thinks that, why blow up this minor, negligible episode in the history of a very famous family into a novel? And why write an afterword in order to use Professor Bloom’s celebrated name to lend it credence, suggesting this minor negligible episode has something important to tell us about these matters crucial to the survival of Jews whom people only truly love when dead? Yes, the author writes the disclaimer that his Professor Blum is not to be confused with the real Professor Bloom anyone enamored with Shakespeare knows, but here again the author is playing with fire, sowing doubt in order to reinforce the veracity and the importance of this very negligible episode that should have remained both negligible and neglected. Or does he not know that there is something tawdry about washing somebody else’s dirty linen in public?
Which leads me to what I think is the main purpose of this novel and its horrible fault, but for that we have to direct our attention not to the past but to the present; to the state of Israel which today is the principal embodiment of live Jews, to the hostility which even western nations and populaces continue to manifest toward it, and to the timidity and ambiguity which characterize the Jews who live among them when it comes to defending their homeland. For make no mistake about it. Israel is the national homeland of the Jewish people and the reason why Jews even in America, the world’s most thoroughgoing democracy, can feel safe in the face of rising attacks. Not because they have guards outside their synagogues, but because Israel exists and will take them in if need be, as Robert Frost once described home. But Jews don’t want to face that self-evident truth, just as they don’t want to face up to the truth Dara Horn told them. And so they tell themselves stories, bad stories, and jump through hoops to persuade themselves that they are not wrong to do so. Obama’s cozying up to Iranian mullahs and throwing Israel under a bus is not so bad. Europe’s financing of Palestinian murderers is not something to stop us from taking Mediterranean cruises. Israel is not the perfect poster of democracy. Netanyahu himself, Bibi that is, Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister is not to be trusted. His current government with its program of judicial reform, support for Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, and calls for putting an end to Arab criminality is a threat to democracy, even incipient fascism.
I personally know Jews who identify as Zionists yet have nothing but visceral hatred for Netanyahu and would do anything to bring him down, just as would his political opponents in Israel. They are the type of people who awarded Cohen’s novel the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. People like them were probably on the committee that awarded this piece of trash the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. After all, what fair-minded reader, having read this book, would not at least be inclined to believe that the Israeli Prime Minister is as corrupt and dastardly as his political opponents make him out to be? Would not that same fair-minded reader be inclined to take the next step and hold Israel responsible for the cycle of violence which most American Secretaries of State bemoan as the obstacle to peace in the Middle East? And who but Bibi Netanyahu prevents this peace from happening, that fat little boy Cohen describes sitting at the top of the stairs, spoiled son of dysfunctional parents, now grown into a man who had the same effrontery as his father to go over the head of the President of the United States and address the Congress of the dangers to his country embodied in the Iran deal? What Jewish statesman dared do that to FDR? Which American Jew dared stand up and say you will no longer kill live Jews?
The barrage of vitriol unleashed on Netanyahu, to which Cohen’s novel and the awards it garnered lend their imprimatur, is but context and justification for the contemporary form the world’s oldest hatred has taken, namely hostility to the Jewish state. Make no mistake about this either. Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. When Chile, thousands of leagues away from the shores of Israel, tells Israel where to build in its own country, that is anti-Semitism. When legacy media from the BBC on down always contextualize their reporting on Israel by claiming falsely that Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria are against international law, that is anti-Semitism. When Thomas Friedman lambastes Israel in the New York Times and the paper’s loyal Jewish leaders keep voting Democrat, that too is a replay of the way progressive Soviet Jews were led to internalize their own humiliation. To turn Netanyahu into a whipping boy because he and the government he now heads dare say no to people who want to see Jewish corpses pile up again, this time in their own land, is as outrageous as it is shameful; and that is an understatement.
The real truth is quite different. Whatever disagreements one may have with Netanyahu – and I disagree with his timidity on extending Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria – one must acknowledge that he has been the steward of Israeli democracy during a particularly difficult time and situation not of his making. To call his present government’s attempt to rein in the Supreme Court an assault on democracy is pure fiction and every bit as nasty as this novel’s fiction is. For Israeli authors to write open letters to American Jews asking for their help in preventing these reforms to preserve their country’s democracy is more nasty fiction and a national disgrace. Can it possibly be that even Jews only love dead Jews because they are tired of this long recurring arc of destruction in Jewish history? If so, even the Talmud won’t save us.