December 13, 2011 | 10:41 am

A Rude Beast in the West Bank

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

The headlines are reporting another sighting of the rude beast that is slouching toward Bethlehem, to borrow yet again the often-borrowed words of Yeats.

When Ehud Barak, foreign minister of Israel, issued a public denouncement of “a string of violent attacks by criminal groups of extremists,” he was referring to the radical settlers who attacked an IDF base in the West Bank, occupied an abandoned army post on the border with Jordan, and injured an IDF commander by throwing a brick at him. 

These outrages against the IDF will not be surprising to readers of Gershom Gorenberg’s provocative but important new book, “The Unmaking of Israel,” which I reviewed here not long ago.  Indeed, the latest incidents validate his warning about the danger that the settler movement poses to the survival of Israel’s democracy and perhaps even to Israel itself.

Gorenberg points out that any peace agreement based on a withdrawal to the security fence that is now in place, which he calls “the unrealistic minimum” for making peace with the Palestinian Arabs, would require at least 65,000 settlers to leave the West Bank. “Any more realistic map of Israel’s borders with a Palestinian state would mean a larger evocation,” he writes.  Based on Israel’s experience during the withdrawal from Gaza under Ariel Sharon, however, at least some of the West Bank settlers — and perhaps a great many of them — will refuse to go.

“The army would have to confront a young generation of settlers determined not to repeat the ‘shame’ of Gaza,” writes Gorenberg. And he wonders out loud whether the IDF, whose ranks now include a great many more officers and soldiers who were trained in yeshivot “aligned with the theological right,” will carry out an order to dismantle the outposts and remove their occupants.

“As men whose belief in the inviolable sanctity of the Whole Land of Israel climb the ladder of command,” writes Gorenberg, “possibilities loom that are worse than refusal: outright mutiny, even decisions by senior officers to deploy their units to prevent withdrawal.”

The irony of the recent attacks by Jewish settlers on Jewish soldiers is profound. After all, the most problematic settlements are the ones that require the protection of the IDF for their very existence.  But Gorenberg reveals an even deeper irony. If he is right, the soldiers who came under attack included men whose sympathies lay with the attackers. 

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

November 29, 2011 | 6:44 pm

Ray Bradbury Enters a Brave New World

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

"Fahrenheit 451": Does it smell like burning fuel?

A certain irony attaches to the fact that Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian classic about book-burning, “Fahrenheit 451,” is now available as an electronic book.  Bradbury himself had long vowed that his work would never be issued in the form of e-books, which he characterized as “smell[ing] like burned fuel,” but not even a futurist as famouos and accomplished as Bradbury cannot escape what is happened to the publishing industry nowadays.

“It’s meaningless; it’s not real,” Bradbury said of the Internet in an interview with the New York Times a couple of years ago. “It’s in the air somewhere.”

Indeed, at metatextual level, there’s something eerie about reducing a book that celebrates the civilizing function of the printed page to a bunch of binary digits in a black box. But, after all, “Fahrenheit 451” ends with a memorable scene in which books are preserved through the act of memorizing and reciting their contents, which is just another way of converting a book from one medium to another.

The e-book version of “Fahrenheit 451” was released today by Simon & Schuster with a suggested retail price of $9.99, a price point that is to the ebook what 99 cents is to the music download. For best-selling authors like Bradbury, that’s a much greater threat than digital conversion since it is less than half of the price of a newly-published hardcover.

Now that’s something to fear about the future, at least if you’re a writer who is waiting for the next royalty check.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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November 17, 2011 | 10:57 am

God Has His Critics, and So Does Harold Bloom

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Harold Bloom as depicted in TNR.

Harold Bloom’s recent musings on Mormonism in the New York Times caught the attention of my colleague, Mark Paredes, who blogged about Bloom in The Jewish Journal.

I’ve been reading Harold Bloom with interest and admiration, and quoting him often in my own work, ever since I picked up “The Book of J” many years ago. I have often found him to be impenetrable and sometimes wrongheaded, however, as when he credits Shakespeare rather than the author of the Book of Samuel for “the invention of the human.” But Bloom’s ability to rub people the wrong way was brought home to me when a distinguished Bible scholar complained to me that Bloom had extracted an idea about biblical authorship from the scholar’s writings without acknowledging the source.

“I think he’s a big fat idiot,” the scholar told me, thus destroying one of my illusions about the elevated nature of academic discourse.

Another recent example of Bloom-bashing can be found in The New Republic, where William Deresiewicz reviews Bloom’s latest book, “The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life” (Yale University Press: 357).  “With ‘The Anatomy of Influence,’ Harold Bloom has promised us his ‘swan song’ as a critic,” writes Deresiewicz. “Fat chance.”

“[A]fter some thirty original books and hundreds of edited volumes,” he goes on, “after evidence of a logorrhea so Niagaran even death will be hard-put to shut it off, there is little possibility that Bloom has given us his ‘final reflection upon the influence process.’ …  ‘The Anatomy of Influence’ is not only not his last book, it’s not even his last one this year. Already in September came an appreciation of the King James Bible, billed, inevitably, as the book that Bloom had been writing ‘all my long life’… ‘The culmination of a life’s work’: is that the last one or the latest one? Neither: it’s the one he published thirteen years ago. The Harold Bloom Show, we can rest assured, is good many seasons yet.”

The Harold Bloom Show is still a ratings winner in American letters, of course, but there are plenty of naysayers.  Deresiewicz is one of them.

“Bloom must surely be the most solipsistic critic on record. Harold is, indeed, a world unto himself,” he writes. “Reading him reminds me of the scene in Being John Malkovich where the title character enters the portal that leads to his own brain to find himself in a world where everybody looks like him, and all they can say is “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich.” In the world of Bloom, every author looks like Bloom, and all they can say is “Bloom, Bloom, Bloom.”

His remarks reminded me of one of my favorite passages from the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, where Singer likens the world to a novel whose author is God.  Bloom expressed a similar idea in “The Book of J.” (“I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God,” writes Bloom, “than are Dante’s ‘Commedia,’ Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear,’ or Tolstoy’s novels, al works of comparable literary sublimity.”) But Singer acknowledges that even the Divine Author has his critics.

“We know that the angels have nothing but praise,” writes Singer. “Three times a day they sing: Sublime! Perfect! Great! Excellent! But there must be some angry critics, too. They complain: Your novel, God, is too long, too cruel: Too little love. Too much sex. They advise cutting.”

If God has his angry critics, I suppose, then Harold Bloom, the critic par excellence, cannot be surprised to find that he has a few of them, too.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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November 15, 2011 | 11:18 am

The Mystery of the Missing Index

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Another kind of index entirely: The Roman Catholic Church's index of banned books.

There’s always something new in publishing in the digital era.

Gilad Sharon’s biography of his father, Ariel, which I reviewed here not long ago, bulks up to 626 pages, but the U.S. publisher of “Sharon: The Life of a Leader” apparently decided to save a few dollars on the printing bill by leaving out the index.

For those of who us need, use and value an index, it is necessary to go to the HarperCollins website, where the index is displayed online.

Some bloggers have complained about the missing index, and it struck me as an odd way to cut down the size of the book.  I found the on-line index awkward to use since it requires those of who still read printed books to look back and forth between the bound volume and the computer screen. 

The inclusion of an index is still a benchmark of a certain degree of seriousness in general publishing, and it is recognized as such by discerning readers. Indeed, I learned a practical lesson about the value of an index when, some years ago, I appeared on an author interview show that was taped in advance of the official publication date of my book, “God Against the Gods,” a book about the history of religion.

After the taping, one of the camera operators approached me with a complaint: “I was looking at your book, and when I saw that it didn’t have an index, I realized that I couldn’t take it seriously.”

I hastily picked up the copy that my publisher had provided to the producer. All of my books include an index, and I was alarmed and concerned about the omission. I shared the cameraman’s assumption that an index was an essential element of a non-fiction book.

What I discovered is that my publisher had resorted to sleight of hand to solve a scheduling problem.  Finished copies of the book were not yet available on the day of the taping, and so the publisher put the dustjacket of my book on another volume of approximately the same size — a novel, as it turns out.  I quickly pointed this out to the skeptical cameraman and assured him that the book as published would include an index, too.

If the same question is asked of Gilad Sharon, of course, the answer to the question will be: “Look for it on-online.”

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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October 29, 2011 | 6:29 pm

Why the Germans fought to the bitter end

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Before the end: Hitler, Goebbels and one of his doomed children

My next book is a biography of an early Jewish resistance fighter who has been mostly overlooked in history, and so I am thinking a lot nowadays about Hitler’s “war against the Jews” and how, when and why the Jews fought back.  That’s why I read with special interest Timothy Snyder’s recent review of “The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944-1945” by Ian Kershaw (Penguin, $35) in The New Republic (November 3, 2011).

Snyder is the author of “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” which I reviewed earlier this year in The Jewish Journal.  His book has been criticized (although not by me) for pointing out that Poland and Eastern Europe were the killing grounds for millions of non-Jews — the casualties of what Isaac Bashevis Singer once called “Hitler’s hell and Stalin’s hell” — as well as the six million victims of the Holocaust.  The death toll is undeniable, of course, but some Jewish readers complain that Snyder blurs the distinction between the Shoah and the other crimes against humanity that took place during the Second World War.

In “The End,” Kershaw, a distinguished British historian of Nazi Germany, addresses the question of why Nazi Germany fought to the bitter end — and, not incidentally, continued to murder Jewish men, women, children and babies — even though, starting as early as 1943, its eventual defeat by the Allies already seemed inevitable.

Ironically, it was the blood-stained Heinrich Himmler, executor of the Final Solution, who tried to open peace negotiations with the Allies in the last days of the Third Reich, but Hitler himself shrilly insisted on fighting to the last German and only put a pistol in his mouth when the Red Army was about to take him prisoner.  His single most fanatical follower, Joseph Goebbels, also arranged to die in the Führerbunker along with his wife after they had performed one last marital act by murdering their six young children.

Snyder, always provocative, points out that there is a certain tragic linkage between the Holocaust and Hitler’s refusal to consolidate his early victories and sue for peace before it was too late.

For example, Snyder argues that German civilians were aware, subliminally if not always literally, of the crimes that were being committed by Germans in uniform. “German boys and girls in 1944 and 1945 were wearing clothing taken from murdered Jewish boys and girls in Belarus, but this did not mean that they saw or thought about those murders,” muses Snyder. “Yet in some sense those murders were present in German life.”

Second, and crucially, Snyder points out that the moral complicity of the German population at large helps to explain why the Germans continued to fight in 1944 and 1945; indeed, Snyder suggests that one of Hitler’s goals in conceiving and carrying out the Holocaust was to make sure that they did.

“Germans in 1944 were considering the world not so much from the point of view of the uncertain future of 1945, but rather in the certain knowledge of what Germans had done to others in the previous months and years,” explains Snyder. “Might this have had something to do with their willingness to fight on, as Kershaw suggests here and there? Peter Longerich has argued that one of the political purposes of the Holocaust was to bind Germans to the regime, precisely because they knew that the world could not forgive them.”

Historians continue to debate what deserves to be called an act of resistance under the dire circumstances of the Holocaust, and it can be argued that there was much more Jewish resistance than was conceded by an earlier generation of scholars. But the fact remains, as TK obliquely reminds us, that no amount of resistance would have deterred Hitler from carrying out the Final Solution and, in fact, may have encouraged to the Germans to kill Jews at an even more frantic pace.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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October 26, 2011 | 10:25 am

Another One Bites the Dust

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

On my drive to work yesterday, I spotted the clearance signs inside the Barnes & Noble in the Westside Pavilion at the corner of Pico and Westwood.  This morning, Kevin Roderick confirmed the bad news at LAobserved.com — the store at the Westside Pavilion is closing soon.

Another one bites the dust.

The closing of a single Barnes & Noble location can hardly be compared to the collapse of the Borders chain, which took out two Borders stores located not far away and hundreds of other stores across the country.  But the steady shrinkage of the brick-and-mortar book business is a sure sign that bookstores are suffering the same fate that befell music stores; sooner rather than later, we will be buying most of our books online.

It’s an especially bad sign that the Westside Pavilion location is closing. It’s hard to imagine a more favorable site for a bookstore — a prominent corner with unmatched street visibility, plenty of parking, and a constant stream of browsers from the Landmark Theatres, whose lobby is located next to Barnes & Noble on two separate floors.

I suspect that a few specialty bookstores will survive and even thrive.  Children’s Book World, for example, is still open and welcoming young readers and their parents only a few blocks east on Pico Boulevard.  But the “destination” bookstore — a venue for author appearances, a place for social networking in the flesh, and a lively gathering place for kids doing their homework, screenwriters churning out their scripts, and office-less entrepreneurs — is going the way of the brontosaurus.

We are witnessing a sea-change in the way books are published and sold, and nothing can or will be done to stop it.  Some aspects of the change are good for authors, publishers and readers. But the face-to-face and hands-on quality of the book business appears to be gone forever.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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August 2, 2011 | 6:06 pm

To Every Thing There Is a Season

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Portrait of Rembrandt's Mother

I am still reeling a bit from the experience of attending Anna Deavere Smith’s riveting but also devastating show about death and dying, “Let Me Down Easy,” which just closed at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica.

As it turns out, the show was an appropriate way to prepare for Dr. Marc E. Agronin’s “How We Age: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Growing Old” (Da Capo, $25). The very first passage in the book describes the dissection of the corpse of a 98-year-old woman, a class exercise in medical school and “a dehumanizing rite of passage,” as the author puts it. 

Now practicing as an adult and geriatric psychiatrist at Miami Jewish Health Systems, Dr. Agronin invites us to join him in confronting the human soul within the aging body, an experience that “force[s] us to look momentarily into an eternal abyss and trigger[s] unanswerable questions about life and death that can bring wonder as easily as fear and despair.”

No prescriptions for long life are offered here, as Dr. Agronin warns us. “I am interested solely in honestly exploring the experience of old age through the lives of my patients,” he writes. But he does hold out the hope that we will learn some lessons about an inevitable and often distressing rite of passage. “These lessons promise not the end of aging but a new beginning even as we continue to age.”

Like Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland (“How We Die”) and Dr. Spencer Nadler (“The Language of Cells”), the author is a practicing physician who is also a gifted writer, a compassionate healer, and something of a philosopher, too.  He is deeply literate, and he decorates his book with apt selections from the Bible, Shakespeare, and the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and T. S. Eliot, among many other sources. But he is too brave and too honest to content himself with rhapsody, and his book — exactly like Anna Deavere Smith’s show — confronts us with moments of pain and loss. Sometimes, he confesses, it is the patient who makes the final prescription: “There is nothing more you can do for me,” said one dying woman named Emma. “It is time to die.”

He writes frankly about the challenges that he faces in his medical practice — the hard cases and the hopeless cases .— but he also looks for and finds moments of redemption.  “As a doctor to the aged, I have discovered that I must embrace this uncertainty and hold on tightly, often plunging in up to my elbows and hoping — sometimes against hope — that persistence and faith will prove correct,” he writes. “I have seen, however, that regardless of the outcome, our greatest humanity emerges in the desperate process of caring for someone old and ill.”

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at www.jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve.

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July 27, 2011 | 6:38 pm

A Make-Over for the Mad Monk

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Grigory Rasputin: Mad Monk or Friend of the Jews?

Almost every day, I am privileged to hear from authors who call my attention to their newly-published books.  But none of them claimed my attention quite as forcefully as Delin Colón, author of “Rasputin and the Jews: A Reversal of History.”

First, she is the great-great-grandniece of Aron Simanovitch, a Jewish man who served as the secretary to Grigory Rasputin himself. Second, she makes the audacious argument that the so-called “Mad Monk” was, in fact, “a healer, humanitarian, equal rights activist and man of God” as well as a benefactor of the Jewish people and a champion of oppressed women.

The conventional wisdom, of course, is that Rasputin, the priest who was spiritual advisor to the last tsar and tsarina of Russia, was a charismatic seducer who exercised an uncanny and unwholesome influence on the monarchs.  He is commonly depicted as an illiterate who loved to imbibe and refused to bathe, a compulsive ruiner of virgins who used his hypnotic powers and the privileges of the priesthood to carry out his seductions.

His moral crimes aside, however, it was his reputed interference in matters of state that prompted a gang of Russian aristocrats to murder him.  Rasputin was famously hard to kill — he survived a massive dose of poison, several gunshots, and a brutal beating before finally drowning when his battered body was sunk in the Neva, or so goes the stories that have long been told about him.

Colón rejects “the outrageous rumors perpetrated by a bigoted, small-minded, self-absorbed society,” including the “debauchery, sins, or crimes” that were commonly charged against him.  She is wholly uninterested in the Grand Guignol that accompanied his murder. She is more interested in what Rasputin did in life.

“The people Rasputin helped – the underdogs of society, the Jews, peasants, and poverty-stricken were not in a position to speak up or even to be believed,” she insists. “The long perpetuated image of Rasputin is of a man who committed evil for the sake of evil alone.  Naturally, the largely anti-Semitic aristocracy would think it evil to champion the cause of the oppressed Russian peasants and especially the Jews.”

Among her sources is the memoir of her own distant relative, Rasputin’s personal secretary, and she concedes that his account has been impugned by historians “due to the inclusion in his memoirs of bizarre court gossip and exaggeration of his own importance in the court.”  But she insists that his regard for Rasputin is supported by the historical record, and she makes an earnest and plausible case in the pages of her book that he was not the monster that his enemies made him out to be.

Russian history provides us with enough real monsters to make even the storybook version of Rasputin seem like nothing more than a villain out of melodrama. According to Colón, however, he was not even that.

Copies of “Rasputin and the Jews” are available for purchase at Amazon.com

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at www.jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve.

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