"Join the club"

In a thread in which compromise seemed impossible, I (thank you, thank you very much) made it happen: it's been decided that we're going to retain the expression "Jewish self-hatred" to refer to that multifaceted phenomenon, but abandon its use as a term to describe (or, worse, be hurled at) individual Jews. Point being, there are many ways in which Jewish self-hatred expresses itself (from the classics - name-change, nose-change - to the "cringe," to the claim some "I'm-the-exception" Jews will make that they and they alone stand apart from those materialistic/warmongering/disgusting masses known as "the Jews"), so to scrap the term altogether makes it impossible to explain those phenomena. But in individual cases, the accusation is pointless-bordering-on-offensive, because it reads as being about telling someone their behavior fails to match up, in Jewiness, with their name or physical appearance. Given that a key part of anti-Semitism is not letting Jews define Jewish identity for themselves, it's a bit much to claim to be fighting anti-Semitism by telling those who don't identify strongly (or in one's preferred ways) as Jews that they're traitors to their true selves.

Also - and this can't be emphasized enough - telling someone he's a self-hating Jew will if anything encourage someone who already thinks he's telling-it-like-it-is to The Jews, all of whom (save him) lack the courage to tell it like it is about (typically) Israel. Case in point. Roger Cohen would obviously like nothing more than to hear from other Jews that he's a self-hating Jew. And given that he writes an opinion column for the New York Times, and allows comments, he's no doubt been called every name under the sun, so it's far from inconceivable that Cohen is, "to self-styled 'real Jews,' not Jewish enough, or even — join the club — a self-hating Jew."

Meanwhile, the actual irritating thing about Cohen's writing on Israel isn't that OMG horror of horrors someone named Cohen is a traitor to Our Kind and has dared to say that the Israeli government does some crappy things. It's that when Cohen writes about Israel, it's always in this cringe-inducing - yes! cringe-inducing - way, where it's obvious beyond doubt that all the man wants, all he wants commenters to affirm (and many always do), is that he's not like those other Jews, that he stands bravely alone and dares tell truths no other Jews will.

It's irritating, because if there are a handful of old-timer sorts who hurl "self-hating Jew" at anyone who thinks being a Jew means something other than 110% support of Israel, there are precisely a trillion zillion younger and more plugged-in Jews - Israeli and Diaspora - who also see Israel as fallible and speak up about it. Recognizing this would, alas, mean that Cohen is - wait for it - just like many other Jews after all, which isn't what he wants to hear.

Given the chunks of his own biography we get from his columns, especially this latest one, it's not all that surprising that Cohen would be on some level have been deeply impacted by the "whisper" (aka "cringing") phenomenon he denounces but apparently grew up with. Thus, even though I'm totally fine with someone named Cohen being a pro-Palestinian activist, becoming Pope for all I care, I do see the temptation to call Roger Cohen a self-hating Jew, simply because one gets the knock-you-over-the-head sense, from his writing, that what he hopes to achieve in criticizing Israel is some kind of official recognition that he's an exception. Some kind of "You're a Good Jew!" plaque. But as tempting as it is, I won't, because R.C. will interpret that as proof that The Jews can't handle his refusal to think the settlements were/are a fabulous idea. There's nothing to be gained from telling Roger Cohen that maybe he suffers from Jewish self-hatred and should have that checked out. There is, however, something to be gained from recognizing that this is a phenomenon, and knowing it when you see it.

Germans and Jews

So I considered posting something about Roger Cohen's latest, but Matthew of Stanford, CA pretty much covers it, writing, "I think it's a really obnoxious way to start an article by saying that the perpetrator of genocide has managed to move on more successfully than its victims."

To preempt a possible response to Matthew (sorry folks - looks like I'll have to post after all): Should the Holocaust be evoked as an excuse for everything that goes wrong in Israel? No - just as colonialism can't be blamed every time a formerly colonized but now independent society screws up. But to say, gee, look how wonderfully Germany's doing, after getting past a stage during which it was convinced of its own national and racial superiority, as versus Israel... it's just missing something fundamental about the psychology of the thing. To say that Germans have created "a wonder from the ashes" - it's unfortunate wording. Yes, Germans and Jews were both in bad shape postwar, and yes, there's all kinds of complex stuff going on in the German psyche, then and now, but really, it's not the same thing at all. Which brings us back to Matthew's excellent point.

So this makes me thing of a couple things. One, "Walk on Water", the Eytan Fox movie, in which a macho Israeli learns pacifism from a gay German descendant of a Nazi war criminal, a young man who wants to know why we can't all just get along. There, as in Cohen's piece, the German and Israeli situations are painted as analogous, and we're supposed to see the German way as superior. Germans are, in the film, gentle and tolerant creatures, granted with some 'issues' stemming from their heritage (neither Axel nor his sister has German lovers, preferring Arabs and Jews, respectively - Axel even makes a point in saying he's never been with German men). But it's ultimately the Israeli with the lesson to learn, which he learns, abandoning Mossad for the rearing of a towheaded half-German baby, the great, symbolic Rebirth at the end of the film.

The other thing I'm reminded of by Cohen's 'look how great the Germans are doing these days, compared to the Jews' is how well his column supports the 'oops, my bad' school of nation-building. As in, the Germans got rid of the populations they didn't want, were able to say, 'That was so wrong of us, we'll never do it again', and now get Roger Cohen praising their 'recovery.' One wonders what Roger Cohen would say to a theoretical Israel that had, in 1948 or 1967, gone the 'oops, my bad' route, killing off the Palestinians, feeling really bad about it... and then conveniently rebuilding the homogeneous (OK, there could be some Arabs, just as there are some Jews now in Germany) civilization they'd wanted in the first place. Hmm.

Roger Cohen brings nuance to the unenlightened Jewish masses UPDATED

Here, in simple terms, is why we can't have a reasonable discussion about anti-Semitism in this country:

1) Country X or Writer Y acts/writes in an undeniably anti-Jewish way.
2) Of 1,000 outraged Jewish leaders/intellectuals, two not-so-subtle thinkers among them, incapable of understanding anti-Semitism in any but its most notorious form, announce the arrival of the next Hitler.
3) Defenders of Country X or Writer Y say, 'Aha, Jews think X or Y is like Hitler, when in fact that's not the case at all! Ergo, X or Y is not anti-Semitic.'
4) Those same two out of a thousand respond to the defenders by calling them Nazi sympathizers.
5) The defenders respond that their Jewish are hysterics, because to face their many Jewish critics who aren't evoking Hitler to explain everything would require facing real challenges to their arguments.

Roger Cohen's latest is a clear case of Step 5. It's easy to claim to be the sole representative of nuance in a debate if you choose only to respond to your least nuanced opponents. And from what I saw of the comments to his last piece, I was far from the only one writing that the argument had some, uh, flaws, without feeling the need to compare 2009 to 1938.

UPDATE

Predictably enough, the comments to Cohen's drivel commend him for his nuance, balance, thoughtfulness, intelligence, courage (what with him being "Cohen"-oh, Roger Cohen we hereby grant you the Good Universalist Jew of the Year Award, for your bravery), reason, logic, honesty, guts, etc., etc. Expect a forthcoming post re: misuse of the term "nuance."

Roger Cohen's Persian Letter

Roger Cohen's column boils down to this: 2009 Iran is not 1938 Germany, Iranians were super friendly to a Jew (who happens to write a column in the New York Times and thus to have gobs of power in terms of PR)... therefore Iran is a decent place for Jews.

Cohen will of course be heralded for his courage to shatter the myth that Iran is pure evil, for his daring to add nuance to the situation. And there's nothing wrong with nuance. What is wrong is an approach to Jew-hatred that defines as 'tolerance' any behavior towards Jews that falls short of genocide. Cohen overshoots the nuance mark, feeling the need to declare Iran not only not as intolerant as one might think, but a place where Jews are treated with "warmth."

The beyond-nuance approach is sometimes found in historical writing--such and such a place had 'only' humiliating laws against Jews, whereas at the same time another part of the world had pogroms, therefore Place A was a wonderful place to be Jewish. Or, these Christians 'only' demanded that Jews convert, whereas these other Christians killed every Jew in sight, making Group A a 'tolerant' set. Is relative tolerance tolerance? On the one hand, remembering a historical context is important, i.e. that 21st-century multiculturalism was not an option anywhere in, say, 1800. On the other, that such and such crap behavior happened in the Past, when Everyone Was Racist, seems a poor catch-all excuse for all past crap behavior, especially when said crap behavior was considered crap behavior by its victims at the time.

But, back to Cohen and the here-and-now:

"It’s important," he writes, "to decide what’s more significant: the annihilationist anti-Israel ranting, the Holocaust denial and other Iranian provocations — or the fact of a Jewish community living, working and worshipping in relative tranquillity."

His take: "Perhaps I have a bias toward facts over words, but I say the reality of Iranian civility toward Jews tells us more about Iran — its sophistication and culture — than all the inflammatory rhetoric."

OK, so, question: how are words not facts? If I were to step out this morning and find a mob denying the Holocaust and shouting 'Death to Israel' (unlikely, I should note, even in Park Slope), would I tell myself how lucky I am that no one firebombed my apartment and the local synagogue, and that I live in a place that tolerates Jews? If a reporter asked me what I thought, and the angry mob was in sight, then yes, I would probably say just that. But I would expect the reporter would take in the entirety of the situation, and not go back to his newspaper and write up a story on the charms of Jewish life in Park Slope.

Shiny objections

-The Letters response to Roger Cohen's latest can be summed up, respectively, as: reasonable, reasonable, pro-Israel and not going to convince the unconvinced, and huh? Re: the last one, where exactly did Roger Cohen encourage "conflation of criticism of Israel, or Zionism, with anti-Semitism"? I thought the thing with the academic boycotts was that even many people far from rah-rah Israel find that a poor approach. People like... Roger Cohen!

-Controversy! A self-proclaimed "half hippie" is also a cosmetic-surgery enthusiast. I'm not even an ounce hippie, but I'm not buying this:

Surgery and cosmetic procedures are such an individual decision, and I would never judge anybody for doing anything. I mean I grew up with a Jewish mother who was always, ‘Look at me now, should I do it?!’ And I thought, ‘Blech, I’ll never do anything.’ You hear so many young people saying, ‘No way, never,’ about something, and I’m like, ‘Honey, just wait.’

Not sure what her mother's Jewishness matters - isn't aging something women of all backgrounds, if especially white women, fuss about? I thought the stereotype with Jewish mothers was that they encourage you to eat?

But in terms of just-you-wait, it's the kind of thing that sounds reasonable - YPIS, oh young people with firm and line-free skin - but is not. It's quite possible to know your values (and squeamishness) well enough that you know you would never sign up for unnecessary and expensive (as in, could go to charity, yes, but could also cover a fab vacation) medical procedures in the name of vanity. Aside from supermodels, most of us late-20-somethings (and indeed most nubile 15-year-olds) already have features a cosmetic surgeon would be happy to address. If you're already not going in for whichever applies in your case (breast implants, liposuction, nose job, or indeed Botox - because past college, there's often a line or two already), you kind of do have a sense of how you'll react when you're 45 and look it. And there's the fact that, while a nose job can definitively change the shape of a nose, anti-aging procedures only succeed in making a woman of a certain age look like a woman of that very same age with disposable income.

-The women of Jezebel, however, can't be accused of not knowing their values. The general consensus among the commenters is that one should only accept an engagement ring from a man who's done extensive research on the ethics of each part of said ring, who's also taken into account his girlfriend's preferred (and preferably obscure) stone, who has taken the time to comb through Etsy and drive to a bunch of estate sales, only to come up with the perfect ring that conveniently enough cost only $10. Extra points, however, go to the fiancés who go out to a shed and weld a modest yet delightful little number.

I suppose it's not so insane, if there really are otherwise sensible women demanding massive rocks or else, to try to change that norm by addressing women rather than men. But I can't quite figure out the logic behind this scenario, in which women expect to be proposed to, with a ring their (male) fiancés have paid for, yet to have micromanaged the ring purchase at a level well above and beyond that of anything they'd buy for themselves. I'm also amazed at how coordinated families and fiancés are when it comes to heirlooms - I can't be the only one who learned of the existence of an heirloom after already having a ring. (I am, however, also wearing my late grandmother's ultra-shiny wedding band, which - ah, living next to Wall Street - cost almost as much as a new ring to resize.) With purchases generally, I do wish more would make the point that if you care about the ethics of your shopping choices, you're better off buying less than shopping like crazy but turning each purchase into a where-did-it-come-from research project.

-OK, so name-change, though a decision I'm happy with for myself, is indeed a massive bureaucratic hassle. Everything on those checklists not related to driving I've been dealing with the past couple weeks. In the process, I was reminded that the university is not sure if a grad student on fellowship is a student or an employee - whichever one I told any of the dozen or so folks I've dealt with in the quest to make the name they have match up with the one Social Security does, the other was inevitably correct. Only at the end of this adventure did I speak with someone who gave me the winning answer: you have to just assume you're both, and do everything separately as a student and an employee. Made sense in retrospect, but I'd been dazzled by the idea - supported by the claims of two different employees (student workers?) I dealt with - that changing my name in one office would automatically, if I was patient, change it in the whole system.

This experience led me to wonder what, precisely, is meant when women say they're going to continue to use their last names professionally. If you've changed your name at Social Security, presumably you have with HR as well. Isn't it confusing if your boss/clients/whatever know you by a name that's not the one on your paychecks? This question is more than theoretical, because I'm keeping maiden-as-middle for the wild off-chance that I at some point publish a paper (sent a draft to a prof just today, so anything's possible), and for my Facebook/Google identity, but did not think it necessary to go the extra bureaucratic mile required to make that official.

"Why should Arabs be any less pragmatic than Jews?"

Roger Cohen has stepped up his efforts to win Acceptable Jew of the Year, showing more of his now-trademark "courage." Readers, remember, you either agree with his columns and are for Truth, or you disagree and are a partisan bigot. Here, the passage he wants angry Zionists to cite:

Perhaps Hamas is sincere in its calls for Israel’s disappearance — although it has offered a decades-long truce — but then it’s also possible that Israel in reality has no desire to see a Palestinian state.

One view of Israel’s continued expansion of settlements, Gaza blockade, West Bank walling-in and wanton recourse to high-tech force would be that it’s designed precisely to bludgeon, undermine and humiliate the Palestinian people until their dreams of statehood and dignity evaporate.

The argument over recognition is in the end a form of evasion designed to perpetuate the conflict.

Israel, from the time of Ben Gurion, built its state by creating facts on the ground, not through semantics. Many of its leaders, including Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, have been on wondrous political odysseys from absolutist rejection of division of the land to acceptance of a two-state solution. Yet they try to paint Hamas as irrevocably absolutist. Why should Arabs be any less pragmatic than Jews?

Rather than arguing with Cohen, telling him that Israel is always right (it's not, but by agreeing to this, I fail to live up to his straw-man standards for his opponents), or invoking Nazi Germany to tell him why he's wrong (as he expects his Jewish critics to do), I'd rather just look at how he sets up his argument.

The question he ends the key passage with - "Why should Arabs be any less pragmatic than Jews?" - is an attempt to shift the entire Israeli-Palestinian debate in all sorts of useless ways. First, by suggesting that the conflict is not between the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships, or even between Palestinians and Israelis, but rather between "Arabs" and "Jews," he drags in millions of people not directly involved in the conflict. Doing so, he implies that anyone who sees Hamas as "absolutist" means to label Arabs generally as such. By setting the argument up like this, you cannot call Hamas absolutist without being an anti-Arab bigot. But by the same formula you also can't call the Israeli government absolutist without being an anti-Jewish bigot. But not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism, goes the chorus, and the chorus is correct. What is Cohen trying to accomplish?

What he wants to elicit from readers is a knee-jerk, PC, guilt-filled response to the question, "Why should Arabs be any less pragmatic than Jews?" He expects readers not to look too deeply at the question, and to just say, 'You're right! To say that would be racist! I don't think I'm a racist. But to be sure, I'd better agree that Hamas is no more of an impediment to Mideast peace than is Israel.' As though to think, in a given political conflict, one side is more the problem than the other, you'd have to be a racist, because as we all know, in every contentious debate, both sides are equally at fault. (Sarcasm, if this wasn't clear.) In all seriousness: it is entirely possible not to find Jews more essentially pragmatic than Arabs, yet to think that, for political and historical reasons, the Israeli leadership is more likely than the Palestinian leadership to accept compromise at this time.

If I find baseless accusations of racism especially off-putting, it could be because this morning, a man yelled at me for not agreeing to his request that I give him money for a cup of coffee, as requested, explaining that the reason for this was because "You're afraid of black people." Yes, that must have been the reason! (Again, sarcasm.) Far more likely than that I don't wish to give money to each of the dozen people (of all races) on each block of Park Slope and the Village who ask, or than that I found "a cup of coffee" not the most compelling of demands. Or maybe I'm a grad student who doesn't make much money, a stingy Jew, a haughty bitch. There are all kinds of possibilities -including unpleasant ones - far more likely than racial phobia.

But this man was, by all accounts, either very poor, insane, or some combination. His baseless accusation of racism could come from all kinds of places, from having dealt with racism in the past, from having noticed that being called 'racist' makes pale-skinned Park Slopers feel guilty and thus give money, or... who knows. Roger Cohen, on the other hand, has no good reason to presume that those who consider Hamas extremist think this not because of Hamas's charter or actions, but because of essentialist, Orientalist, phobic views of 'The Arab.' Again, if this is what he wants to argue, he's going to have to accept that this means defining all criticism of Israel as Judeophobia, which would, of course, get us nowhere.

Roger Cohen on free speech:

On the firing of an old bigot for slandering Jews in France, a country whose greatest crime was arguably against Jews:

"Curtailing speech is generally far more dangerous than allowing even vile views to be aired, not least by a cantankerous has-been like Siné."

On the firing of an old bigot for slandering blacks in America, a country whose greatest crime was arguably against blacks:

"Over a week went by between the insult, at once racist and sexual in its evocation of crinkle-haired whores, and the ouster. Time enough for a number of middle-aged white guys to opine that Imus had been a careless idiot, was contrite and should keep his job. [...] Some people never get it."

I doubt if Roger Cohen sees a difference between references to "nappy-headed 'hos" and ones to "shaved Jewesses"--both are follicular insults against women who come from ethnic groups not known for having fine, blond hair. The insults were not about basketball players or heiresses, per se, but about the groups they represent to the bigots in question.

No, the difference here can be attributed to the fear among Jews (or those named Cohen and thus perceived of as such--I don't know if the columnist is Jewish) of seeming too concerned with Jews and not focused on Humanity. To get all in a huff because of anti-Semitism is to be one of those whiny Jews. Better to have that noble distance when discussions turn to anti-Semitism, and to reserve one's visible fury for bigotry directed at any group other than one's own.

What's wrong with Paris?

The next time someone asks me about French anti-Semitism today, I will suggest that he look at the comments to mainstream articles in the American press about Israel, or about any subject with some tangentially Jewish subject matter. The latest batch: the responses to Roger Cohen's NYT piece about Sarkozy's taboo-breaking presidency.

Time will only tell how this guy Sarkozy pans out…but his initial endorsements by our mainstream media and people like Cohen (and other Jewish intellectuals in America) is telling and, needless to say, very troubling for this American.

Notice that there are on the one hand Jews in America, and on the other, Americans. Along with, well, that the fact that some Jews favor a politician is in itself "very troubling."

Then, here's a good one:

Who do you play racket-ball with, roger? SarCONzy has been using the right-wing playbook from the start. Claiming the victimization of French Jews* and the Catholic Church while calling the more pigmented ghetto youth slime.. He has also pushed for morals(catho, of course) to be taught in the public schools. H B Levy suggests that he has been an apologist for Vichy..your attitude about anti-immigrant rhetoric is Panglossian, at best.

*In France, I’d take being Jew over Maghreb any day.

Except that French Jews today tend to be of North African origin, so contrasting "Jew" and "Maghreb," is absurd, as is the remark about pigmentation. Believe it or not, it is possible to be concerned for the fate of French Muslims without making snide remarks about how French Jews have it easy.

"It would be a horrid shame to see President Sarkozy’s son intermix."

As commenters have pointed out here and at Roger Cohen's piece, free speech is not some kind of tenure for racist entertainers. It's about limiting the government's right to intervene, not about a constitutional right (extending, strangely, to France--don't they get to have their own laws?) of bigots to be paid large sums of money to broadcast what they really think.

Now that that's settled, it's worth revisiting what, exactly, Cohen thinks constitutes freedom of speech, if it's something other than the First Amendment, and if it, whatever it is, does not protect Imus. Given his heroic non-deleting of comments to his article, it appears free speech means the freedom to have your say about the Jews before a wide audience.

So, a look at those comments, beginning with the most bizarre...

"I am really offended by this article. Paris is based upon a Catholic faith, as are numerous cities in America. It’s very disturbing to see outside religions mix, particularly when it comes to history and prominent families. It would be a horrid shame to see President Sarkozy’s son intermix. He can love whomever he wishes, but for God’s sake, do not change the purity of religious basis in France. Remember WW2. Please remember that the Jews financed and provoked every war in history. This information is according to numerous men that fought in WW2. It’s not a matter of being anti-semitic, it is a matter of preserving other religions and higher moral standards in which many people believe and live by everyday."

Wow, every war in history! Even in places without any Jews! This comment appears just a bit ignorant of the history of French secularism, not to mention of Sarkozy's own lineage, but I'm not totally sure the comment itself isn't a joke. So, moving on, this time from a longer comment about how anti-Semitism is justified because Jews are so Jewy...

"An unregulated wall street (read cdo s and sivs and morgage sausage) is bringing this country to it’s knees. Read the names. The Jewish neocons at DOD and the WH, particularly the vice president’s office…and AIPAC in congress got their war. Has no one noticed?"

OMG yes! Indeed, this commenter is the first person ever to notice that the Jews control everything. So it's a good thing he pointed that out. The "read the names" comment brings us back, of course, to the name of the columnist. I don't know if he's Jewish, but sounds like the commenters have it figured out. Now, onto a comment that hits upon a theme in a bunch of them...

"Jews today do not suffer from anti-Semitism, at least not the anti-Semitism that sent them to the gas chambers in Europe."

Right, this is true: if bigotry fails to lead to a sufficiently gruesome genocide, it's not bigotry at all. I mean, I could live with the anti-Semitism that leads to execution-style shootings, or the anti-Semitism that leads to torture in a warehouse, but the variant that leads to gassing, that I will not stand for! As always, denials that anti-Semitism still exists sit alongside some of the most openly anti-Semitic comments. Why? Because the anti-Semitism of today never lives up to the sort we saw images of on our school trip to a Holocaust museum.

There were some other good ones, including, "In the USA, the Jews own and control most of the media. I see now the Jews trying to do same thing here in Europe," and, "I suggest that all Zionists move from Europe to Israel. We don’t need your poison here." The latter is interesting, since ostensibly the anti-Zionists care about the plight of the Palestinians, and thus would want fewer Zionists in Israel. Or might "Zionists" be code for something else? There was also some man from Germany, with one of those names (a German one) exercising his freedom of speech admirably.

The Zionist left is struggling to grapple with the fact that the way to show your courage on the left (or on the isolationist right) these days (as always) is by daring to speak out against the cabal. What strength it must take, given that the Jews control everything, to shout from the rooftops how much you hate them! It's like some kind of triumph of the will.

Against 'terroir'

It comes as no surprise that Roger Cohen, who gets just about everything wrong, devoted his latest column to praising the French notion of terroir, "the untranslatable combination of soil, hearth and tradition that links most French people to a particular place."

I find it telling that Cohen translates this 'untranslatable' term as being about French people, when the term is, I believe, about French wine, and to a lesser extent foods, that can, according to myth, only be done right if produced on certain land. The people involved in this production - farmers and the like - should, in theory, be able to come from absolutely wherever. What with France's massive history as a destination for immigrants, the notion that to be French is to have timeless ties to a particular dot on the French map is just... no.

However. The innocuous if irrational idea that one can only produce a certain gastronomical product in one locale has historically been a short leap away from the belief that human beings are in some mystical and eternal way tied to their ancestral lands. This take - most memorably expressed by right-wing intellectual Maurice Barrès - is, of course, essentialist racist ridiculousness of the sort that has long, long been discredited. Applying 'terroir' to people not only denies the possibility of integration (of immigrants from far-off lands, but also, potentially, of people from the next town over) but conveniently ignores the 'mixed' heritage of those who can supposedly trace their history purely to one given spot.

That America doesn't have this concept is, I'd say, among the country's greatest strengths. Americans are better-positioned than Europeans to embrace local food, small-scale production, farmers' markets and the like without holding nonsensical beliefs about the 'sacred' quality of their land, without believing 'local' has to go beyond just food produced in the area to being food native to the area, preferably produced by a farmer who's family's been on that land for countless generations. I, for one, want it to stay that way. The worst possible direction the American food movement could take - and while there already are hints of this direction, it's hardly the dominant view - would be to start blurring the edges between where one grows good food and where one grows good people.

The U.S. is Chicagoan megachurches, Iowan tractor-drivers, and creationist-but-hip pilots

What to blog about... Since Amber Taylor got 20 comments on her post about the first time she met Will Baude, I suppose I could try to remember when I first met the man, but having only met and never met him (we were classmates, he seemed like a good guy--racy info., I realize), I'd imagine such a post would attract less controversy. So instead, I'll tell a little about my evening with some of the greatest minds of our generation, whom I heard speak this evening at the Goethe Institute in NYC.

Brief notes:

William Kristol is a smart man. I've heard him speak before, and there were moments throughout the evening in which he was pressed on various points conservatives seemed doomed to lose on, and yet he would stand his ground and really have me convinced, temporarily, that any position other than his was idiotic. I repeat, temporarily. More on this later...

Bernard Henri-Levy was certainly of interest to me as someone interested in France, Jews, and neoconservatism (he's supposedly a French Jewish left-wing neocon philosopher. Whatever that means). But he was introduced by moderator Roger Cohen as a stunningly attractive man (I don't remember the exact words used, but along those lines) which forced me to try to crane my head to get a better look at him. I mean, from what I could tell, he didn't look bad, but it seemed an odd way to introduce a speaker on a panel about anti-Americanism and related subjects. My take on male beauty may not be the same as Mr. Cohen's, and I didn't appreciate being told where to stand on Mr. Levy, nor did I think that Mr. Kristol and Mr. Schneider were so grotesque as to merit being passed over, appearance-wise, during the introductions. They all seemed well within normal limits, from what I could see, and most of what I could see was the head of whomever happened to be sitting in front of me. Which brings us to...

Peter Schneider, a German author who was the sole panelist I'd never heard of, sent a positive message, that the U.S. and Europe have more ties than divisions, and that, while he disapproved of the Iraq war, he agrees that it's always a good thing when a dictator is removed, and that an all-powerful U.S. is better than, say, an all-powerful communist China. But he made a snide remark about a "tractor"-riding Bush-voter from "Iowa" that seemed utterly gratuitious, and that introduced a sad theme of the evening, which was the supposed idiocy of Middle-Americans.

A major problem I have with, well, stuff, is that there's no simple way for a person to love what NYC and similar places have to offer culturally, and in terms of tolerance of eccentricity, and yet, at the same time, realize that NYers are no smarter or kinder as individuals than are people in other parts of the country. I've tried before to explain where I stand on this--basically I adore the city, I happen to like living here, and I would personally feel out of place living in a small town where everyone else was a very particular sect of fundamentalist Christianity. However, I don't think a kid who happens to grow up in Manhattan is any smarter than one born in Kansas, nor do I think that the "party line" of the New York liberal is much more intelligent than that of the Middle-American conservative. I also believe strongly that it is no better to be knee-jerk liberal than knee-jerk fundamentalist Christian, in that both ideologies lead to some very dippy, sometimes even dangerous, conclusions. (My beliefs may well come from the fact that I go to school with people from the places Schneider and Levy scoff at, and many of my classmates could easily have held their own with the panelists.)

But now, let me explain this scoffing: Levy mentioned a straw man (born of a "real" anecdote) who's a young pilot in the Heartland, who, though a fan of hip music (Levy snapped his fingers a bit to demonstrate the beat), is nevertheless a creationist. Levy also mentioned that he knew about America and that he'd visited the "mega-churches in Chicago"--as if Chicago is really out there, and not just a more spread-out and dingier version of NYC. Nevertheless, this creationist pilot was discussed througout the evening, and I began to really feel sorry for the guy. Kristol defended the pilot, noting that more harm had been done during the 20th century in the name of Darwin than by Darwin's detractors. Kristol then went on a riff about how this young man was probably a kind soul, nice to his neighbors, tolerant of diversity, etc. I mean, who knows? A creationist pilot could be a real creep, or he could be nice but misguided--why ascribe any extra traits, when clearly it's just a free-for-all? Basically, Kristol's defence of the religiousity of contemporary American conservatism went something like this: Sure, it messes with the church-and-state divide, but so what, it beats fascism. Meanwhile, the "European left" couldn't quite get enough of the cretinous American creationists who apparently defy all that is "enlightened." I am as bothered by politicians' invocations of God as are European intellectuals, but I'd have to say that the pilot-of-straw is at least not sporting a keffyiah like his young native-French counterpart...

In any case, the most frappant (to be "European") moment of the evening was when an older man referred to the entire audience as well as the panelists, during his question to the panelists, as being the "elite." But elite, how? Because we were in NYC? Because we'd chosen to spend $10 on this (wine included, though) rather than on some lame Hollywood movie? I had no idea, but I ended up feeling more resigned than influential at the end of the evening. It seems that men like Kristol support some aspects of the Bush plan and thus use their wits to defend the more objectionable bits, whereas men like Levy and Schneider simply cannot get over the fact that they are cool Europeans whose continent may have wreaked all sorts of havok over the past thousand years but which at least realizes now that the Earth is round.

Other problems included Levy's response to a woman who asked why, given that Israel the nation is a result of Europe's hostility towards its Jews, is Europe so critical of Israel's right to defend itself. A fair question, and, if simple, no more simplified than the rest of the issues discussed throughout the evening. Levy responded that the problem isn't that Europe is critical of Israel, but that it places the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the center of world, as though solving it would solve everything. But it seems to me that, if Europe places this conflict at the center while siding almost exclusively with the Palestinians, then this woman's question ought to have been properly answered. Levy also reiterated that, in places like Pakistan, no one cares about Israel--then why was Daniel Pearl forced to repeat, during his killing in Pakistan, that he and his parents were Jews? Guess I'll have to read Levy's book to find out where he stands on this. Additionally, Levy suggested that the current alliance between the anti-Semitic French Islamists and the traditional, native-French anti-Semites might be a temporary one, and thus not worth worrying about. It seems even without the paranoia of Uncle Leo a person might be less optimistic than Levy on this front.

Then, there was Kristol's defense of America's blurring of the boundary of church and state: why must those why support the war on terror feel obliged to defend Bush (and other US politicians, left and right) in his ridiculous quest to suggest that God is helping us to fight religious fundamentalism (an absurd suggestion as could be). I want to agree with Kristol, that the creationist pilot is a good guy. And he may well be a good guy, but not necessarily a harmless one. A nice guy could conceivably possess a silly idea.

(Where are the anti-terror but still church-and-state-separation-respecting people hanging out these days, if not among the "elite"?)

Two new genres for 2012, two examples for each

-Defending the Glamorous:

We saw this with the pains a former prof of James Franco took to insist upon the movie star-scholar's academic serious. But we saw it again when Nicholas Kristof stood up for known underdogs like George Clooney (!) and Angelina Jolie (!!!), the latter of whom Kristof confesses, in an aw-shucks-intellectual-version moment, he did not recognize.

-Offending the Target Audience:

It's a safe bet that Matt Gross (see the post below, and his response - ! - in the comments) knew his article about Jerusalem would tick off religious Jews, Zionists. He may have guessed that in simply agreeing to fly to Israel as a travel writer and not a Rachel Corrie, he would win the ire of some on the left. (And he did!) But he also managed to offend the kind of left-of-center Jews who do get involved in learning about and criticizing the treatment of the Palestinians, the growing power of the not-so-progressive ultra-Orthodox, other "iffy" aspects of Israel. Gross's problem seems to come not from the genuine problems (myriad and well-reported) with Israel, but from a sense that the place is kinda Jewy, and that which is Jewy induces a cringe. Thus even his ostensible fan base - the readers who praise every Roger Cohen intervention - did not give him his hero's welcome after all.

Then there's Alex Gallo Brown in Salon, who, along with his girlfriend, grew tired of being hipsters with "privilege" and left Portland of all places to become volunteer organic farmers in the South-loosely-defined. (New Mexico?) All they wanted was to see the country, get out of their parochial "blue state" environment, and make the world a better place! Yet pretentious turns of phrase, a remarkable lack of self-awareness, a bizarre grievance against "blue-state" women who do grocery shopping, all of it hits the wrong note, and wins them all kinds of YPIS-hurling enemies among Salon readers and, inevitably, Gawker. The angry horde is of course made up of those very much like the writer (that is, in favor of owning privilege, and demolishing regionalist parochialism in its snootier forms), and not Mexican farm workers or poor Southerners. But oh, they're angry.

I read the newspaper comments so you don't have to

-A woman who doesn't live in Park Slope, doesn't even live in NY or CA wakes at 3:30am, panicked, asking herself, "Am I green enough?'" Amazing.

Like I said, like I know others have said, like I wish more would say, the so-very-now ideal of buying only pure/clean/local/seasonal/sustainable/organic is a modern-day version of the expectation that surfaces require dusting. It's about giving women busy-work. If all the truly offensive crap were removed from the shelves, if lotions didn't need to be checked for parabens, if broccoli didn't have to be checked for place of origin (but also be sure to feed your family lots of fresh produce! no canned/frozen! remember that cans have BPA!) what would women do?

Oh, and because I do love online-newspaper comments, I will note that one commenter to the Mommy Insomnia story wins smug-of-the-year.

-Because I can't stay away from newspaper comments (even my dissertation is in part on the 19th C version thereof), dear Roger Cohen commenters: Wow, you [OK, there are more, but I'm tiring of the exercise] really are dreamers, you who ask why no one-state solution. If only everyone in the world were as tolerant and wonderful as you!

What you're missing, however, is that the problem isn't that there's so much hate in the region, or that The Jews are such a stubborn bunch. It's not because for all eternity, The Jews and The Arabs have been mortal enemies, and these two swarthiest of peoples fail to behave like Scandinavians and make nice. It's not that such a state couldn't function. It's that there's an awfully strong ethical case to be made for there to be a Jewish state in Palestine. There's not a particularly strong case to be made for it having any particular borders. And there's also, at this point, one heck of a case for there being a Palestinian state as well. I, from the relative comfort of the NJ woods, want there to keep on being a Jewish state, not because I think Israeli Jews should be spared the horror that would be living alongside an Other, not because I think both peoples are simply incapable of getting along, but because I find the case for Jewish national self-determination convincing.

Charles Blow deigns to respond to famed neocon Eric Alterman

Charles Blow, WTF? Have you applied for the Roger Cohen award for riling everyone up about The Jews in the op-ed section of the Times? What if, for the sake of argument, not one Jew had voted for Obama, or not one American Jew felt "enthusiastic" about him now. What then? Ought our citizenships be revoked en masse?

In Part II of his charming discussion on how The Jews have now gone and rejected yet another Messiah (even though knowing full well he wasn't aligned with the Christian Zionists and promised a tougher stance on Israel than his oh-so-helpful-in-that-region predecessor, The Jews - myself included - used our 'disproportionate influence' to help put him into office), Blow begins with a criticism he received in another big-name publication. "I generally ignore these types of responses [...]" Blow explains. What "types of responses"? What does he even mean? Critical ones? I read what not-quite-Glenn-Beck Eric Alterman had to say in the Daily Beast, and am not sure what about it would make him dismiss this "type" of article from the get-go:

The thing about Jews is that you can find one willing to say just about anything. Do Jews support the Park51 Community center? Yes, they do. Do they oppose it? Sure. Do they oppose Israel’s settlement policy? Absolutely. Do they support it? Damn straight they do. On what authority does Blow have it that most American Jews decide their vote purely on the issue of Israel, or that Obama’s policies toward Israel are particularly unpopular with Jews?

This strikes me, at least, as the bleeding obvious. And, to return to the issue at hand, it is in everyone's best interest if Obama and Clinton sort out the Middle East, if Israel's borders shrink, a Palestinian state is created, and Israel-as-a-Jewish-state is stable going into the future. Even big old Zionists like yours truly want this to happen. Do I know precisely how this is to be done? No, but my job is to finish a dissertation proposal about nineteenth century France.

Alterman doesn't even dwell on Blow's Jew-baiting throwaway remark. He refers to it as "cryptically" expressed, not anti-Semitic, and even says he agrees that Jews have disproportionate influence. What does Blow mean, that he wouldn't normally even bother with critics like Alterman's? Was it Alterman's tongue-in-cheek use of "goyim" that offended him? Otherwise, the only explanations make Blow look even less tolerant towards The Jews than was already the case.

Blow, meanwhile, has found a warped way of looking at numbers that can be interpreted in a warped way to mean that even lefty American Jews are just these massive anti-Muslim bigots, hovering somewhere to the right of Sarah Palin, more loyal to Likud than the good ol' U S of A. See, if you tilt the graph upside down and read it from a headstand, or maybe while doing a cartwheel, you'll clearly see that Jews hate Obama on a visceral level and are only pretending to be Americans while cabalistically gathering support for a Greater Israel that will extend light-years beyond your wildest imagination.

Speaking freely

One last thing about the whole Roger Cohen-free speech debacle. The problem seems to be, as a commenter here points out, a confusion over what's "free speech" and what's the advisability of offering the public a wide range of viewpoints. The New York Times offers an op-ed page with columnists who span the political spectrum, not because the First Amendment requires it, and not even because the abstract principle of free speech advises it, but because it keeps readers informed/interested/reading the newspaper. What results, however ideologically-diverse it appears, is a carefully crafted set of viewpoints, meant to look like it represents the whole spectrum, but really just whatever the newspaper felt it should have. Not every reader has a column in each newspaper, so not all voices are heard. That having some semblance of balance is a good thing does not mean a NYT with only Paul Krugman clones would violate free speech.

The confusion goes even further. Some seem to think that free speech is infringed upon not only when those who want a platform are denied one, but when others denounce the speaker's ideas. Apparently freedom to speak out against a bigot is not freedom of speech, because bigots are courageous and it's really their speech that we need to protect, not that of bigots' detractors. Some say it violates Ahmedinejad's free speech to protest his having been invited to Columbia. On account of free speech, you owe it to him to listen to his every word with the benefit of the doubt. Or, if you read The Israel Lobby start to finish and conclude it's an anti-Semitic book (which it is, and I have read it, and can direct you to specific passages if you're interested: for example, did you know that while Jews per se are not the problem, we should be concerned that Jews come out to vote in disproportionately high numbers?), and you in turn write that you think this, then you've violated Walt and Mearsheimer's freedom to speak, that is, their freedom to speak and receive nothing but adulation.

In other words, just because you don't like X doesn't mean X violates free speech, constitutionally or otherwise. Declaring it does makes you look like a fool. The end.

How the market works

The image that perhaps best evokes the modern-day food movement is that of Alice Waters at a farmers' market, admiring the fresh, local, seasonal, and organic produce, conversing with the farmer who both produces and sells the goods in question. Yet how important markets are to eating well is often just assumed. So is market-procured food any better than alternatives?

Ever since reading this excerpt of Michele de la Pradelle's Market Day in Provence, I've been suspicious of markets, a suspicion that has not stopped me from shopping at them, but anyway.

Sample passages:

Narrow-range stallholder trade has held up best in places with many tourists. It was at this market in any case that I found the most fully evolved instance of such a stall. The very structure of the table across which seller and buyer usually interact has disappeared, and piled up on overturned plastic crates in an indescribable jumble are a few very round pumpkins, huge squashes, onion bunches, the scale, some celery stalks, and, in place of Prévert’s raton laveur, a guinea pig with its own sign: “I’m a guinea pig, don’t touch me.” This type of display may lead the customer to believe, or at least suggests to him, that he is buying lettuce or leeks directly from the person who patiently transplanted and hoed them. In reality, Roux’s fruits and vegetables come from the marché-gare (the section called le petit marché, used above all by producers who have only small quantities to sell), though he does have his “own” little producer, a neighbor of his in Pernes.

And,

To convey still more convincingly that the product is homemade, it is insinuated that the honey is from the vendor’s own beehives, that she herself has spun the wool for the sweaters or cut out the sandal leather. The presence of practicing craftspersons at the market—chair-bottomers, for instance—reinforces this illusion. In fact, though the product itself is handcrafted, the customer is not necessarily dealing with its maker; any direct relation between producer and buyer is exceptional today.

According to Jo, however, this is no great revelation. It's apparently general knowledge in Belgium, at least, that markets sell the same produce year-round, making it clear to anyone with even the remotest sense of what grows where when that not everything comes from nearby. The reason the food at the market is somewhat better (and pricier) than at supermarkets isn't that it comes from different sources, but, he explained, that it's selected in small batches, more carefully, by market sellers, but from the same warehouses where supermarkets buy wholesale. People thus shop in markets not for what they imagine to be authentic experiences with farmers, but for a tastier end product.

The market in Heidelberg seems to fit this model - produce bears signs of nationality, but unless you choose to restrict yourself to Deutchland, anything goes. And even if you stick with German goods, Germany's a big country, so you're not exactly eating locally, regardless. But, ingredient by ingredient, even if the same items are sold at the market and the store, there is a perceptible quality difference between the two. That, and the market's proximity to this amazing coffee place, keep me going back for more.

Part of what interests me about the question of markets and their worth is that to many who shop at markets in NY (my sense from real-life conversations, articles I no longer remember where I read them, and teh Internets), the Greenmarket seems like a lesser version of European markets, understood to be the real thing on which the Greenmarket is based. Yet the Greenmarket actually enforces the ideal of terroir, of providing foods specific to the area where they are sold. And local-foods markets are an Old Country import, predating even Alice Waters's formative trip to France. So basically the imitation of the thing ends up outclassing the original.

It's my sense, then, that the market, even in Europe, is 'better', if at all, because of several things that have nothing to do with food quality - sometimes the quality is better, but if so, that's just a happy coincidence. The reasons are as follows:

1) What the market doesn't sell: Sure, the market in Heidelberg sells lemons, Camembert, and other items not from the region, but it remains a primarily fruits-and-vegetables situation, with some meat, cheese, and (wheat, typically) bread, and nothing in the way of ice cream, fries, packaged foods, etc., i.e. not most of what's sold at a supermarket, in the States or in Europe. The ingredients themselves may be no healthier or tastier than their supermarket equivalents, but they are conducive to cooking and eating at home, to eating low-calorie foods, etc. The market is about nostalgia, so even if foods are available that would not have been in that particular place 50 or 100 years ago, the foods present are nevertheless items that someone's ancestors were eating several generations back, and are thus 'real' foods by the movement's standard.

2) The artificial sense of scarcity the markets impose: Because they are usually between one and three times a week, and only open (or any good) in the mornings, markets change the rhythm of food-shopping, from an after-work or Sunday-night trip to the supermarket, where time - of the day and the year - is all one. The lack of convenience of the markets makes it so that only those committed to thinking ahead about each meal, and, often, to shop at times others are at work or asleep, can get the goods.

3) Along those lines, there's the time one must spend at the market, paying separately at each stall, and comparing what are often the same items at many different stalls. Whereas at a supermarket, apples are with apples, milk with milk, and you pay once, at the end. There's no expectation of chit-chat about the produce along the way. The market is an activity, not a chore. And as the food-movement adherents have made clear, we are so very fat because we don't cook for ourselves. Presumably spending time tracking down your food, even if it in theory takes time away from preparing dishes, correlates with devoting extra minutes each day to putting meals together.

4) The payment situation is also conducive to spending more than you'd planned, because rather than seeing what you've bought all in one cart and, at the last minute, removing that one container of berries or piece of cheese that would really put things over the top, it's only at the end of the trip, when you compare how much money you had on you with how much you've spent, that you get your total 'receipt' for the day. This is nearly always an unpleasant surprise, which is why if you are going to a market, it's best to take with you only the amount of money you're willing to spend. But another credo of the food movement is that we spend too little of our incomes on food, and that if we upped the proportion of food to, say, flat-screens, we would no longer be so hideously obese as to offend the likes of Roger Cohen at amusement parks.

In other words, markets recreate a time when food was not available in infinite variety, at all hours, and at low prices. This holds true regardless of the place and manner in which the food at any given market was produced. So, The Market is itself of interest to The Food Movement, even though markets themselves are sometimes a bit of a farce. Thus ends my grand theory of food-markets.