Been reading a lot about Dreyfus once again. Nope, I just can't get enough. He was a good-looking guy, apparently. Not that it says so in any of the books I'm reading, but there are pictures, and from the pictures he looks not too shabby. And Jewish, too, I hear, so perfect prom-date material. In any case, I just read a couple things that are super-duper-relevant for my long-since-finished BA. One: The Dreyfus Affair was almost completely non-violent. This is significant because.... Because that explains why it often gets overlooked, and why, for a not-so-obscure thing to be interested in, naming it gets a whole lot of "huh"s from otherwise knowledgeable types. And also, I found an essay that says a bunch more about the French Jewish response to the Affair, and which might support or might contradict the arguments I made in the BA. I'll have to think about it.
In other news, crossing over from Alsace into Germany-by-way-of-the-Lower-East-Side, I travelled east for dinner with my parents at Loreley, a German restaurant (and beergarden!) on Rivington Street. I had the cheese spatzle with salad and a gigantic (for me, at least) beer. Photos may be forthcoming. The salad arrived first, and I assumed the spatzle would be under the salad. As I was poking around for it, the waiter arrived with a huge plate of spatzles and caught me wondering if there were spatzles underneath the cucumbers. I'd just assumed a hip LES restaurant would have tiny portions. The waiter had a good laugh.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Dreyfus buff
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6 comments:
"He was a good-looking guy, apparently. ... And Jewish, too, I hear, so perfect prom-date material."
Bringing a dead date to the prom is a bit too Romeo & Juliet for my tastes.
I thought it is rumoured that Emile Zola died under mysterious circumstances (murdered ?) due to his support for Dreyfus. This would make it somewhat less non-violent.
Even if Zola was murdered, and even knowing that Dreyfus, as well as other French Jews, were physically assaulted from time to time, the Dreyfus Affair was nothing violence-wise compared to, say, WWI. The Affair may have had a bigger impact on history, or at the very least on Jewish history, totally disproportionately to the amount of violence it involved.
"the Dreyfus Affair was nothing violence-wise compared to, say, WWI."
Hiroshima was nothing violence-wise compared to WWI.
And the Affair was, of course, nothing compared to Hiroshima. I chose WWI because that's the event most people think of when they think early 1900s France.
If nothing else most educated people are familiar with the j'accuse article.
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