May 4, 2010 | 7:53 am

From the International Writers’ Festival, Jerusalem - Holocaust Writing

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

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Sarah Blau, moderating a panel called “Ashes and Ink,” called attention to an apparent paradox: the farther removed we are from the historical Holocaust, there more writing there seems to be.  What’s more, alongside the steady flow of scholarly studies and memoirs, there continue to be literary works that have new things to say.

Some of them use fiction as a means of uncovering truths through invention.  The Spanish novelist Adolfo Garcia Ortega, one of the panelists, cited War and Peace as an example of how novelists have poetic license to invent historical events for noble reasons.  Garcia Ortega, who had never written a Holocaust-themed work before, felt he had to take up the subject after reading Primo Levi.  Levi’s recollection of Auschwitz If This is a Man mentions a 3-year-old boy who died, and may have been born, in the camp.  That boy’s unknown story became the impetus for Garcia Ortega to grapple with the imagined particulars of such a life.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s medium, as a critic and scholar, is non-fiction.  His book The Lost recounts his personal investigation into the deaths of six members of his own family in the Shoah.  He makes an impassioned case for specificity and against generalization: as he said, “everything happens at a certain moment in time.  All these generalities happened to specific people; everyone has a specific death in a specific moment in a specific way.”  As for Auschwitz, Mendelsohn pointed out that it became the symbol of the Holocaust because it’s where the Jews from Western Europe were sent, and some lived to tell about it; Belzec is not that symbol because practically no one survived.

Israeli writer Nir Baram, meanwhile, intentionally avoided Auschwitz altogether in his new novel Good People.  His story looks at everyday life in Nazi Europe through two characters, one of whom is an ambitious Albert Speer-like intellectual for whom the removal of populations is an abstraction until he begins to glimpse what it actually looks like.  He is a bureaucrat who believes in what he does because it serves his personal cause of becoming a great man.  The story ends in 1941, before most of the murders of the Final Solution have taken place.

Should a writer try to describe the unimaginable?  Garcia Ortega, referring in particular to Jonathan Littell’s The Benevolent Ones, defended the role of fiction, saying there is a place for “interpreting the facts in a more metaphorical way.  Those stories will be more remembered than books that saturate the reader with facts.”  Mendelsohn, by contrast, said “All the descriptions in my book are quotations from witness statements.  I don’t want to describe something I have no intimate knowledge of.  I felt that I couldn’t imagine/invent/recreate this kind of atrocity.  Witness statements are more eloquent than anything I could imagine.”

Bob Goldfarb is president of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity in Jerusalem and Los Angeles.  His blog posts about the Writers’ Festival also appear on the website of the Jewish Book Council.

 

May 4, 2010 | 7:42 am

From the International Writers’ Festival, Jerusalem - First Post

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

This week I’m blogging from the International Writers’ Festival at Mishkenot Sha’ananim in Jerusalem.

Israeli author Zeruya Shalev made an emblematic observation when she spoke yesterday at the Festival.  “It’s risky to meet the writer behind a book you love,” she remarked.  “It’s like meeting the parents.”  Of course that’s exactly what the Festival all about: encounters with people you feel you know through their offspring, and the combination of recognition and surprise that entails.

Shalev took part in one of a series of sessions entitled “Writing Here, Writing There,” moderated conversations between two authors from different countries.  She was paired with the American writer Siri Hustvedt, with whom Shalev shares the feeling that a fictional world is a kind of dreamscape.  In Hustvedt’s words, writing is “a form of conscious dreaming.”  For Shalev too it mixes the subconscious with life, a fusion of fantasies, fears, experience, and imagination.

Thinking about the interplay between life and imagination, Hustvedt, whose novel The Sorrows of an American deals with the September 11 attacks, described how she drew on a family memory in writing about the aftermath of trauma.  Her father was a soldier in the Pacific in the Second World War, and when she was young her father had flashbacks about a terrible incident when a Japanese POW was killed.  His speechlessness in the face of those memories led her to use more sensory imagery in her fiction.

Somehow it’s not surprising that both authors have an interest in psychoanalysis.  Although she starting writing when she was very young, Zeruya Shalev wanted to be a psychotherapist.  But when she tried it in the Israeli Army as a kind of social worker she was overempathetic: as she listened to her patients, she said, “I would start to cry, and they had to comfort me.”  So, she wryly concluded, it was safer to work with imaginary characters.  Hustvedt also wanted to become a psychoanalyst after she earned her Ph.D., a goal that was unrealized, though she has taught writing to psychiatric patients as a kind of therapy.

Siri Hustvedt observed that readers love characters the way they love people in real life, and weep at the death of a beloved character as if they actually knew them.  “Literary theory is a different ballgame,” but the way people actually read, she said, is to engage deeply with characters.  For her own part, she continued, “Don Quixote and Anna Karenina are as dear to me as many people in my life.”

At the same time, Hustvedt cautioned, what one should fear most in life is being shut off from what is present in the external world.  “There is great potential for being wounded, and great potential for joy.  Only the unprotected self can feel the beauty of joy.”

Bob Goldfarb is president of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity in Jerusalem and Los Angeles.  His blog posts about the Writers’ Festival also appear on the website of the Jewish Book Council.

 

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April 30, 2010 | 8:59 am

Dual Loyalties, Then and Now

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

The Forward’s Gal Beckerman reported this week on new concerns about “dual loyalties” among American Jews, and talked about it in a podcast with colleagues (listen here).  “So totally aligned have the United States and Israeli governments been for most of the past 20 years,” he writes, “that American Jews have not been forced to seriously consider that these two identities could be in conflict.”  In other words, he feels the charge of dual loyalties becomes an issue to the extent that the foreign policy of the United States differs from Israel’s.

That’s a peculiarly myopic view of an accusation that has dogged the Jewish people (and others) for centuries.  The charge of dual loyalty has historically been existential: that Jews are by nature inclined to put their own interests ahead of allegiance to their country.  It is seen as a devotion that transcends momentary policy debates.  When Jonathan Pollard was accused of espionage in 1985, fears of the dual-loyalty charge had nothing to do with disagreements about foreign relations.  Jews were afraid that they would be seen, like Pollard, as willing on principle to breach the security of the United States for the sake of Israel.

In the 1930s, before the State of Israel existed, fears of the dual-loyalty charge centered on the fate of Europe’s Jews.  The American Jewish community was fearful that it would be denounced for placing the welfare of fellow Jews above the best interests of the United States.  When war broke out in 1939 the U.S. was officially neutral, and Jews were afraid to advocate entering the war for the same reason.  It was not a question of loyalty to another country, but rather to one’s own people.

German Jews had the same trepidation.  After World War I conspiracy theories circulated, saying the Jews had disloyally “stabbed Germany in the back.”  It is no coincidence that the representative body of liberal Jews in Germany, founded in 1893, was called the Central-Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, the Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, pointedly stressing that its members were Germans first.  Even three generations before, as David Myers has written, the “anti-Jewish agitators of the illiberal, post-Napoleonic era…continually raised the specter of Jewish clannishness and disloyalty.”

And it’s not just Jews who stand accused.  When John F. Kennedy was campaigning for the Presidency in 1960, he spoke out in West Virginia against recent, widespread allegations of his “divided loyalty” as a Catholic.  He declared he believed in an America where “no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope.”  In 1928, when the Democratic Party nominated another Catholic, Alfred E. Smith, as its presidential candidate, Smith was similarly accused of being “totally subservient to the Vatican,” again not because of any particular stance but as a matter of identity.

It’s understandable that 21st-century American Jews would want to believe that the question of dual loyalties comes down whether they agree or disagree with Israel’s policies rather than their identity as Jews.  After all, that’s how many Jewish Americans experience it: they think of themselves as citizens of the United States who are entitled to different opinions about Israel.  Some take special pride in holding Israel to American values rather than working to maintain America’s support for Israel.

But as Jews in Europe and Latin America know especially well, Jews still are widely seen as a distinct people who not entirely integrated into the countries where they live.  The Germans never believed that Jews were “German citizens of the Jewish faith”; they saw Jews as an alien people with their own agenda.  There have been similar sentiments in the United States for a long time, leading to the long-held prejudice that Jews are not entirely loyal to America first.  It’s possible that those feelings have suddenly dissipated.  It is also possible that that’s wishful thinking.

Bob Goldfarb is the president of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity.  His Twitter feed of news about Jewish culture can be found at http://twitter.com/bobgoldfarb.

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April 25, 2010 | 5:36 am

Remembering Alan Rich, 1924-2010

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

Classical music has lost one of its most astute and beloved chroniclers.  Alan Rich, former critic at the L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, died Friday.  For over sixty years he covered and commented on concert life, from the Koussevitzky era at the Boston Symphony to the Dudamel era at the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  He was respected and loved by legions of friends and colleagues.

I first spoke with Alan in 1972 when I interviewed him for Harvard’s undergraduate radio station, WHRB, of which he was an alumnus.  He continued with radio after college, when he moved to Berkeley and broadcast over KPFA.  Once, while reminiscing about those days, he asked me if I had ever heard of Philip K. Dick, the author of many now-classic science-fiction novels.  I was dumbfounded when Alan told me, “He was my roommate.”  Another friend of his from those days was KPFA’s film critic, the then-unknown Pauline Kael.

In 1984 I became Alan’s colleague at KUSC Radio, where his audio essays were a regular fixture.  He also produced award-winning programs about the music of Kurt Weill and other twentieth-century music.  Alan had come to Los Angeles to be part of New West Magazine after many years as the tastemaking music critic of its parent publication, New York.  After the magazine’s demise he stayed in L.A. and became the music critic for Newsweek.  His writing was always both plain-spoken and authoritative, a combination as rare then as it is now.

Later, when I worked at the former KFAC-AM-FM, I invited Alan to be a commentator on the station.  In those pre-Internet days he would sometimes drive to the studio after a concert to write and record a review for broadcast the next morning.  I’ll never forget watching him at work.  He would sit down at a typewriter, insert a blank piece of paper, and proceed to type his complete 500-word script from beginning to end.  He knew exactly what he wanted to say and how to say it.

Critics sometimes become bored with the routine of concertgoing.  Alan never did.  In his last years he was as eager to encounter a new work, hear a new soloist, or see a new opera production as he was when he went to Boston’s Symphony Hall as a student.  He also never lost his unshakeable integrity.  Besides speaking his mind about musical matters without fear or favor, Alan didn’t hesitate to puncture pomposity or pretension when he encountered them.

His artistic judgment was of course highly sophisticated.  I sat with him at a performance at the Bing Auditorium of a new Pierre Boulez work, watching as he took in the highly complex music with rapt fascination and spontaneous delight.  Yet he certainly was no snob.  The film “Billy Elliot” moved him to tears, and he loved classic Hollywood films too.  One day, over a sushi lunch, Alan shared with me his latest enthusiasm: the audio-book version of a Harry Potter novel.  He was charmed by the story and dazzled by the British actor who impersonated all the many characters.

A few years ago I saw Alan, at the premiere in San Francisco of the John Adams opera “Dr. Atomic,” for what turned out to be the last time.  I’m not sure why, but as we took our leave I was moved to tell him how much I had always liked and admired him.  I am grateful to have been granted that chance.  Most of all, I’m fortunate to have known Alan Rich, a gifted, dedicated, endearing, singular human being.  May his memory be a blessing.

Bob Goldfarb is the president of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity in Los Angeles and Jerusalem, and a former executive at radio stations KUSC and KFAC.

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April 23, 2010 | 7:54 am

Arguing with Critics

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

Are critics necessary?  The blogosphere has been abuzz with that question over the past month, ever since New York Times film critic A. O. Scott gave the question a high profile in print.  He was moved to write about it after his television show, “At the Movies,” was unexpectedly canceled.

At the core is the question whether there’s anything truly special about professional critics.  They can be prized for qualifications and skills that make their opinions more reliable, or disparaged as members of a privileged class who exert unfair influence because of their positions. 

It’s true that media outlets, whatever their journalistic values, have sometimes appointed people with no apparent qualifications to write about arts and culture.  One major-city daily newspaper chose as film critic a staff member who had no training in film or previous experience writing about cinema.  The New York Times famously chose a drama critic because he was thought a stylish writer, though he had no special knowledge of the theater.  That kind of decision can confirm readers’ worst fears about the abuses of editorial power.

Yet some criticism is read for its insight and originality decades or even centuries after it was written.  Samuel Johnson’s literary essays, music reviews by George Bernard Shaw and Virgil Thomson, the art criticism of Clement Greenberg, and the film writing of James Agee and Pauline Kael are only the most obvious examples. 

Besides their close knowledge and penetrating observations, each of those writers spoke with a singular voice that compels attention even today.  Andrew O’Hehir, writing this week in Slate, remarks that “film criticism is a kind of performance, an adjunct form of entertainment.”  A.O. Scott, thinking about the original hosts of “At the Movies,” realized “I don’t go back into the archive of Siskel and Ebert’s reviews to find out how they voted, or for consumer advice, but rather to hear the two of them argue.”

That, more than the democratization of opinion or the obsolescence of old media, may be the most important thing.  Singular personalities with well-founded ideas will always attract attention, whether pontificating from on high or scrapping on a blog.  “The future of criticism is the same as it ever was,” mused A. O. Scott.  “Miserable, and full of possibility.” 

Bob Goldfarb is president of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity in Los Angeles and Jerusalem.  He also comments regularly on eJewishPhilanthropy.com.

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April 20, 2010 | 1:36 am

Gaza Photo Exhibition in Seattle

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

Last week I wrote about the unexpected, abrupt “removal” of an exhibition at the University of Washington that included war photographs from Gaza.  Now it’s reported that “Global to Local: Narratives of War, Resilience and Peace” will open tomorrow after all.  Larry Johnson, who is identified as the politics reporter of the Seattle PostGlobe, has been covering this story and his latest report is online here .

Johnson concludes that “there was nothing sinister about the removal of the artwork.”  The Odegaard Undergraduate Library’s stated reason for the removal was that “all of the art should be displayed at once, and, apparently, there was one section of the exhibit that had not been posted yet.”  On the other hand, Johnson quotes the curator, Amineh Ayyad, as saying “I am unhappy about the unnecessary ongoing requests to change content of the exhibit and to omit educational contextual information…there will be fewer photos than were on display the past two weeks and other altered content.”

The curator’s stated agenda is “to spread knowledge about the devastating effects of war on health, especially mental health, and peacebuilding through health.”  Whether its main message is about war in general or Gaza in particular should be apparent once the exhibition is open to the public.  Ayyad has previously exhibited photographs in Seattle under the title “Peace in Palestine.”

Curiously, neither the Seattle Times nor the Web-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer appears to be covering this story.

Bob Goldfarb is the president of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity in Los Angeles and Jerusalem.  He is also a book critic for Jewish Book World and a regular contributor to eJewishPhilanthropy.com.

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April 18, 2010 | 9:37 am

Heresy and Intolerance

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

Fewer than 500 women in The Netherlands, out of a population of 16.5 million, wear a burqa, a garment worn by some Muslim women as a sign of modesty.  Yet, according to an Associated Press report , “There is broad support in the Dutch parliament to ban face-obscuring clothing except if required by law for safety or health reasons.”

Meanwhile, in Belgium, AP reports that the parliament’s Interior Affairs committee unanimously backed a similar proposed ban March 31, and the initiative is expected become law in July.  It would apply to all public places, including streets, even though the vast majority of Muslim women there don’t wear one.

Why all the fuss?  According to a Belgian legislator, ““The point is public security, the need to show one’s face in public. Not religious freedom.”  But no one has proposed banning ski masks.  Foreign-looking clothing is threatening to many Europeans because it’s a reminder of the encroachment of something “foreign.”  It’s a powerful symbol, representing a fear so widespread that that the populist Freedom Party in The Netherlands may end up with 25 seats in the 150-member House of Representatives.

Americans are afraid that “foreigners” will take away their jobs, but Europeans see a threat to “European values” from Islam.  Unlike the United States, Europe’s history is replete with wars over religion: the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots vs. Queen Elizabeth, the Catholic church against the Huguenots in France, and the Thirty Years’ War, to say nothing of the Crusades.  It also has a lethal history of ethnic strife down to the present, including the Serbian slaughter of Bosnians and the Russian campaign against the Chechens.  It is probably no coincidence that the victims in those last two cases are Muslims.

The European response to the Nazi experience has been to treat ethnic strife as a relic of the past that is incompatible with a liberal democratic future.  Xenophobia has nevertheless resurfaced, this time in a different guise: as the tension between democracy and theocracy.  French president Sarkozy claims he wants to ban burqas because “the veils compromise women’s dignity.”  But when France banned not only Muslim head scarves but also Jewish kippot and Christian crosses from the schools, it was because of an across-the-board intolerance of public expressions of religiosity.  That is an irrational prejudice cloaked in the pretense of being impartial.

For the past two hundred years the torchbearers of the Enlightenment have had faith that history is on their side, that it would be only a matter of time until rationality replaced what they saw as superstition.  The decline of religion among Western Europeans, however, is an exception in the world.  Elsewhere religion continues to thrive and to play a meaningful and even a defining role in people’s lives, a phenomenon Europeans find threatening because it is heretical.  No wonder their response is to resort to coercion, as they have done so many times in the past.

Bob Goldfarb is the president of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity in Los Angeles and Jerusalem.  He is also a book critic for Jewish Book World and a regular contributor to eJewishPhilanthropy.com.

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April 16, 2010 | 5:05 am

Art and Politics in Seattle

Posted by Bob Goldfarb

The University of Washington, in Seattle, has reportedly just taken down an art exhibition planned in conjunction with a conference on “War and Global Health.”  The exhibition, “Global to Local: Narratives of War, Resilience and Peace,” was curated by a UW graduate, a Palestinian-American artist and public health worker named Amineh Ayyad.  According to a press release, it was to include “photos about the Gaza war and blockade by award-winning Palestinian photojournalists; encaustic paintings from local refugee children of different countries and Jewish & Palestinian artists; a photo-essay about medical relief and peace building efforts in Palestine; and a sculpture created by an Iraqi-American artist.”

Ayyad was quoted as saying, “I wanted to curate an art exhibit as a way to display qualitative and quantitative data about war, siege and displacement and their impact on health.  I believe this is an effective method to communicate such information to the university community, especially to the thousands of undergraduate students who visit the library daily.”  That kind of statement is bound to raise red flags.

No matter how often it happens, the collision of art and politics always seems to surprise people, as if art existed on a separate plane detached from the imperfections of reality, like pure mathematics.  Art also draws it power from its resonance with lived human experience, however, and that includes politics.  There are aesthetic standards for judging a work of art – the composition, the choice of materials, the technical skill of its execution, and so forth.  But a viewer’s response will also be conditioned by his or her own experience and sympathies, which is why art can be controversial.

When art arouses passion these days, especially if politics are involved, the controversy is usually over competing narratives rather than the work itself.  In a case like the closed exhibition at the University of Washington, one side will inevitably claim censorship and assert the right to be heard.  But museums are not havens for free expression.  Even if they are publicly funded, their job is to decide what to exhibit and what not to exhibit.

Another battle cry is “balance,” as if every issue has two equally valid sides.  The reality is that “fairness” is a function of public opinion.  Most of the world considers slavery to be unconscionable, so there is no expectation of balance when slavery is treated in art or anywhere else.  A discussion seems out of balance when it moves too far away from the prevailing consensus.

That’s the underlying issue when Israeli/Palestinian issues come up.  If public opinion in Seattle is generally sympathetic with the Palestinian cause, the idea of presenting “photos about the Gaza war and blockade by award-winning Palestinian photojournalists” will seem reasonable.  If the consensus is that Israel is often unfairly demonized, this exhibition will appear to be another example of that demonization.  In other words, what’s at mostly stake is neither aesthetics nor “balance” nor “censorship,” but rather the legitimacy of the artistic statement in the eyes of the community.

University officials have the responsibility for deciding whether an exhibition is appropriate, and the State of Washington and its voters ultimately can decide whether those officials are doing a good job.  Arguments about fairness or censorship – or anti-Semitism, or the proper uses of public funding, or the rights of artists – are a way of exerting power in that decision-making process; they’re not about principle.  The outcome will tell us less about the role of art than about the realities of politics.

Bob Goldfarb is the president of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity in Los Angeles and Jerusalem.  He is also a book critic for Jewish Book World and a regular contributor to eJewishPhilanthropy.com.

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