[T]o qualify as pathological, narcissistic tendencies must impair functioning in real and painful ways. The self-absorption must not be explicable by age (toddlers are notorious tyrants) or socio-cultural environment (football stars are encouraged to act like Roman emperors). A true narcissist is all ego, unfettered and clumsy—he sees only himself, and yet the vision is opaque to him. He thrashes around in desires he can’t understand. Perhaps he loves No. 1 uncomplicatedly, or perhaps there is loathing mixed in. In her Harper’s piece “Me, Myself, and Id,” Laura Kipnis writes that the narcissist “lives as though surrounded by mirrors, but he doesn’t like what he sees.”
As Waldman explains, narcissism’s classification remains contested:
For psychiatrists, the question isn’t really “do narcissists exist” or “are narcissists any different from the rest of us.” It’s “are narcissists mentally ill?”
Behind this question lurks another one: What do we gain, and lose, from picking out a psychic phenomenon and declaring it “sick”? Are we needlessly stigmatizing ordinary behavior? Absolving jerks of responsibility for their trespasses? Conversely, given our more advanced understanding of mental illness as biological—a complicated interweaving of genetic, developmental, and environmental factors—are we being more humane? Making it easier for people who are suffering to find treatment? …
[I]t seems strange to insist that, because small-N narcissism lives in everyone, narcissistic personality disorder can’t inhabit its own pathological real estate on the far end of the continuum. Anxiety disorders exist, though we all get anxious. And just as mental illness itself has undergone a transformation from perceived moral failing to medical ailment, perhaps we can begin to see certain persistent dispositions as disabilities rather than spiritual flaws.
David Sheff was struck by that fact during a recent visit to the impound lot:
I took a cab and entered a single-story brick building where a few dozen people were crowded together in a scene that evoked Kafka; weariness, frustration and anger were palpable. Some stood in line, some paced and some sat hunched on the floor. A family huddled in a corner, an infant asleep on the father’s shoulder. A woman on a pay phone wept as she begged whomever was on the line to find money so she could get her car back–she said she needed $875. “I’m gonna lose my job if I’m not there at 5.”
Clerks sat on stools behind Plexiglas. At a window, a man pleaded with an agent, “I have to pick up my kids in less than an hour. What am I supposed to do?” At the next window, another man railed loudly and furiously, yelling, “How the hell am I supposed to get my goddam money if I can’t get to goddam work?” The clerk said, “If you can’t get cash, you can pay by credit card or cashier’s check.” The man shouted, “And if I had a goddam limousine, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Virginia Postrel suggests some improvements for hospital-room decor:
When the University Medical Center of Princeton tested a mock-up room with nice views, a sofa for guests and no roommates, it found that patients asked for 30 percent less pain medication, reports the New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman. This result shouldn’t be surprising.
The seminal study on the subject was published in 1984 — that’s right, 30 years ago — in Science. Roger S. Ulrich, now an architecture professor at the Center for Healthcare Building Research at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden after many years at Texas A&M University, compared two groups of patients recovering from gallbladder surgery in the same hospital, matching patients for characteristics such as age and obesity that might affect their recovery. One group looked out on some trees while the other faced a brick wall; their rooms were otherwise almost the same. Patients with a view of the trees required significantly less high-powered pain medication and left the hospital earlier, after 7.96 days versus 8.70.
Thirty years of follow-up research later, and it’s still news when someone designs a hospital room with a view.
Karen Abbot discusses women’s experiences in the Civil War South:
In the sudden absence of husbands, fathers, brothers and beaus, white Southern women discovered a newfound freedom — one that simultaneously granted them more power in relationships and increased their likelihood of heartbreak. Gone were the traditions of antebellum courtships, where family connections and wealth were paramount and a closed circle of friends and neighbors scrutinized potential mates, a process that could last for years. The war’s disruptions forced elite Southern parents to loosen rules regarding chaperoning and coquetry, which one prominent lecturer called “an artful mixture of hypocrisy, fraud, treachery and falsehood” that risked tarnishing a girl’s reputation. The girls themselves relinquished the anticipation, instilled since birth, that they would one day assume their positions as wives, mothers and slave mistresses, that their lives would be steeped in every privilege and comfort. The war ultimately challenged not only long-held traditions of courtship and marriage, but the expectation that one might wed at all.
Turning ahead several decades, Niamh Gallagher reviews Elisabeth Shipton’s Female Tommies, which chronicles women’s role in World War I:
Significantly, Shipton’s work suggests that the war may have marked a watershed for women after all, at least for those engaged in the military. She argues that “the place to look for the lasting effects of the militarisation of women in the First World War is not 1919 but twenty years further on, in 1939”. For example, the famous Bletchley Park Wrens (members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service) who participated in decoding the secret communications of the Axis during the Second World War had their origins in the Hushwaacs, a section of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps formed in 1917 in the wake of persistent efforts by British “female Tommies” to force the War Office to form an official women’s military corps.
A century after the Great War began, and at a time when the changing roles of women in the armed forces are a focus of media attention and public debate, Female Tommies is a valuable resource for those keen to learn about individuals who helped to lay the foundations for women’s frontline participation in wars of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Reading all the reader responses to my question about the books, poems, and stories that have meant the most to you has been such a rewarding experience. My reading list certainly has grown even more unmanageable. What I’ve appreciated the most, in addition to the gratitude for books on display, are the anecdotes that have accompanied many of your suggestions. Not only can a story or poem be a consolation, but they remain connected to what we were going through when we read them – and perhaps even shaped how we perceived and understood what was happening. Thank you all for sharing. Here’s more of your responses, with this reader reminding us of a recent classic:
I nominate David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon commencement address. Though a commencement speech, I encountered it as essay. I’ve been rather amazed at how it has stuck with me. “This is water. This is water,” has become a personal mantra, a constant reminder to practice mindfulness.
Another:
I’m late to the thread (as usual!), but I’ll throw on the pile anyway – Theses on the Philosophy of History by Walter Benjamin. Its theme, and the famous passage that reflects it, is undoubtedly dark, but in a way I have always found liberating rather than depressing:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
At a time when I was always looking for an answer, a solution, a neat narrative to tie everything together – I read this book and realized that I could (obviously) be wrong, that there are no answers, no fix, no solution to magically make things whole, to return to whatever came before. Understanding that that’s not possible helped me, in its own way, face forward.
By the way, I didn’t actually see Angelus Novus until years later, in Jerusalem. To say it wasn’t what I was expecting would be putting it mildly.
Another reader writes:
Matthew Sitman wrote that he read when feeling lonely. When C. S. Lewis was asked why he read, he replied, “I read to know that I am not alone.”
My favorites are poems, especially by Robert Frost and William Butler Yeats. One of which is this one by Yeats, written when he was a young man:
“When You Are Old”
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Another praises this poem:
I heard David Whyte recite “Lost,” by David Wagoner, 12 years ago, and it has been my favorite ever since. It’s about how the elders of the tribe instructed children to act if they ever got lost in the woods. It’s really a lesson on what to do whenever you feel lost.
“Lost”
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
Here’s another poetry selection:
I guess I am a shallow sort, but I love this little ditty by Walker Gibson:
“Advice To Travelers”
A burro once, sent by express,
His shipping ticket on his bridle,
Ate up his name and his address,
And in some warehouse, standing idle,
He waited till he like to died.
The moral hardly needs the showing:
Don’t keep things locked up deep inside –
Say who you are and where you’re going.
Another describes Luc Sante’s phenomenal short story “The Unknown Soldier” as “a source of strange comfort.” An excerpt:
I stood yelling as he stabbed me again and again. I shot up the bag as soon as I got home, but thought it smelled funny when I cooked it. I was asleep in the park when these kids came by. I crawled out the window and felt sick looking down, so I just threw myself out and looked up as I fell. I thought I could get warm by burning some newspaper in a soup pot. I went to pieces very slowly and was happy when it finally stopped. I thought the train was going way too fast, but I kept on reading. I let this guy pick me up at the party, and sometime later we went off in his car. I felt real sick, but the nurse thought I was kidding. I jumped over to the other fire escape, but my foot slipped. I thought I had time to cross the street. I thought the floor would support my weight. I thought nobody could touch me. I never knew what hit me.
They put me in a bag. They nailed me up in a box. They walked me down Mulberry Street followed by altar boys and four priests under a canopy and everybody in the neighborhood singing the “Libera Me Domine.” They collected me in pieces all through the park. They laid me in state under the rotunda for three days. They engraved my name on the pediment. They drew my collar up to my chin to hide the hole in my neck. They laughed about me over baked meats and rye whiskey. They didn’t know who I was when they fished me out and still don’t know six months later. They held my body for ransom and collected, but by that time they had burned it. They never found me. They threw me in the cement mixer. They heaped all of us into a trench and stuck a monument on top. They cut me up at the medical school. They weighed down my ankles and tossed me in the drink. They named a dormitory after me. They gave speeches claiming I was some kind of tin saint. They hauled me away in the ashman’s cart. They put me on a boat and took me to an island. They tried to keep my mother from throwing herself in after me. They bought me my first suit and dressed me up in it. They marched to City Hall holding candles and shouting my name. They forgot all about me and took down my picture.
So give my eyes to the eye bank, give my blood to the blood bank. Make my hair into switches, put my teeth into rattles, sell my heart to the junkman. Give my spleen to the mayor. Hook my lungs to an engine. Stretch my guts down the avenue. Stick my head on a pike, plug my spine to the third rail, throw my liver and lights to the winner. Grind my nails up with sage and camphor and sell it under the counter. Set my hands in the window as a reminder. Take my name from me and make it a verb. Think of me when you run out of money. Remember me when you fall on the sidewalk. Mention me when they ask you what happened. I am everywhere under your feet.
Another:
I am a bit surprised no one has yet submitted Li Bai (also Li Po) and Du Fu (also Tu Fu), two of the most famous of the Chinese T’ang Dynasty poets. Perhaps I find their work consoling as their poems of distant friends and exile speak to my own state of mind (living far away from friends and family and the familiar for work).
Much like the poets and novelists of the 20th century, they wrote in a time of violent political and social chaos (the An Lushan Rebellion in the mid-eighth century) that divided friends, devastated the country, and drove writers and poets into exile. Their best work meditates on friendship, exile, poetry, the pleasures of drink, loss, and the mutability of things, while cultivating a deep reverence for nature as a source of beauty, even order, in a chaotic and unpredictable world. It’s not surprising that their poems, in translation, were deeply admired by many of the 20th century’s greatest poets, from H.D. to Pound to Rexroth to Carruth.
Two from Li Bai:
“Taking Leave of a Friend”
Here at the city wall
green mountains to the north
white water winding east
we part
one tumbleweed
ten thousand miles to go
high clouds
wandering thoughts
sunset
old friendship
you wave, moving off
your horse
whinnies
twice
(trans. David Young)
“Seeing That White-Haired Old Man Legend Describes in Country Grasses”
After wine, I go out into the fields,
wander open country – singing
asking myself how green grass
could be a white-haired old man
But looking into a bright mirror,
I see him in my failing hair too.
Blossom scent seems to scold me.
I let grief go, and face east winds.
(trans. David Hinton)
And two from his friend, Du Fu:
“For Li Po”
The cloud floats off
the way the sun went
the traveler doesn’t come back
three nights in a row
I dreamed of you, old friend
so real I could have touched you!
you left in a hurry
I’ll bet
you’re having a bad journey
storms come up fast
on those rivers and lakes
don’t fall out of your boat!
leaving, framed in the doorway
you scratched your snowy head
I knew you didn’t want to go
bureaucrats
fatten in the capital
while a poet goes cold and hungry
if there is justice in heaven
what sent you out
to banishment?
ages to come
will warm themselves
at your verses
but it’s
a cold, silent world
you left behind
(trans. David Young)
“Watching Fireflies”
Fireflies from the Enchanted Mountains
come through the screen this autumn night
and settle on my shirt
my lute and my books grow cold
outside, above the eaves
they are hard to tell from the stars
they sail over the well
each reflecting a mate
in the garden they pass chrysanthemums
flares of color agains the dark
white-haired and sad
I try to read their code
wanting a prediction:
will I be here next year
to watch them?
(trans. David Young)
I’ve been really enjoying the thread and all the readers’ submissions and the reminder of the consolations of literature. There are so many other authors I would submit if I had them ready to hand: Ovid, Montaigne, Bulgakov, Anne Carson, and on and on…
Another readers writes:
I’d like to add “Barter” by Sara Teasdale to the thread. I have known it since high school (more than 50 years ago) and the last stanza especially has stayed with me.
“Barter”
Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children’s faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.
Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit’s still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.
Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.
Another:
This is from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (#7) – a high-school graduation present from my mother which I’ve had the pleasure of sharing with those fumbling in the darkness:
And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is some thing in you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance. Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything, in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.”
And one more:
I don’t really have anything long-winded or insightful to say about this excerpt from Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. The book is incredible, but it’s a heavy read that I’ve only read it twice. The passage below, however, I read several times a year. In particular, I tend to read it when a good friend of mine “bumps” it, which is usually when he senses that I’m becoming too cynical about life or the world. I always read it slowly at first, the fever-fast in the second voice (you’ll see). And then I stop just before the last line… and, somehow, afterward it feels like I just went to church. And I try to do something, however small, about all the gun violence in Chicago.
My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity. My thoughts flow thus. Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes.
What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.
What precipitates acts? Belief.
Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history’s Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the ‘natural’ (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?
Why? Because of this: – one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.
Is this the entropy written within our nature?
If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.
A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.
I hear my father-in-law’s response. ‘Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don’t tell me about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the red-necks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell ’em their imperial slaves’ rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium’s! Oh, you’ll grow hoarse, poor & grey in caucuses! You’ll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naive, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!’
Tim Dickinson is out with a superb piece of reporting in Rolling Stone today–a long investigation that picks up where yesterday’s headlines about Burger King and Tim Horton’s (and last month’s about Walgreens) left off. It turns out that these corporate “inversions” are huge business, and part of a trend that dates back at least to the Clinton administration where corporations have bent tax law to make sure their profits stay overseas and beyond the reach of the IRS. The numbers are staggering:
More than $2 trillion in U.S.-based multinational profits currently sit in offshore accounts, representing, by credible estimates, in excess of $500 billion in unpaid taxes. If that money were deposited in federal coffers tomorrow, it would wipe out the deficit for 2014. And every year that Congress dithers on a crackdown, America is forfeiting an approximate $90 billion in revenue.
The offshoring is a complete fiction. The money often comes from US sales, and even though it’s technically in Lichtenstein or the Jersey Islands or Ireland,
these untaxed profits are not stranded. “There’s this false notion that these funds are locked in a strongbox somewhere,” says Edward Kleinbard, a former chief of staff for Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation. In reality, these untaxed foreign profits are often banked, by the offshore subsidiaries themselves, in Manhattan – where they’re used to invest in stocks and U.S. Treasury bonds. “The money,” says Kleinbard, “is already back in the U.S. economy.”
It’s worth reading the entire piece, especially for the unsurprising but infuriating denouement: lawmakers, even the ones rhetorically at odds with these practices (i.e., Democrats) are actually facilitating the whole process. This is the kind of comprehensive reporting we see too little of.
George Packer unpacks what the world lost in the murder of James Foley, and continues to lose as journalism in the Syria-Iraq war zone becomes ever more dangerous:
Among the many reasons to mourn Foley’s death is the loss of his reporting, and of reporting in general, from Syria. News of the civil war from Western media organizations has been dwindling as security has deteriorated, and it is now likely to dry up. Local Syrian reporters face an even greater threat. The Committee to Protect Journalists says that at least eighty journalists have been kidnapped since the start of the war and at least seventy have been killed, almost all of them Syrians, and almost all in 2012 and 2013. So far this year, the confirmed number of journalists killed is down to six, Foley being the most recent. (Solid information is increasingly difficult to get.) This cannot be because working conditions in Syria have improved. One likely explanation is that few reporters, and even fewer who reach Western audiences, are still covering the war. This would be disastrous under any circumstances, but it is especially calamitous now.
He also laments how thoroughly the chattering class has politicized the crisis:
The debate about ISIS almost automatically becomes a debate about who’s to blame for it: who started the Iraq War, who withdrew from it, who supported Nouri al-Maliki, who didn’t support the Syrian rebels, who helped to create ISIS, who failed to see ISIS coming, whose policies turned Muslims into jihadists, who has a right to say anything at all. These arguments are a sweet substitute for the thankless task of formulating honest answers to the questions raised by ISIS, which would inevitably mean advocating morally dubious actions with no certainty of a good outcome, as well as having to repudiate many of one’s earlier views.
Reflecting on his own experience as a war reporter, Tom Peter concludes that collecting facts that will only be doubted, disbelieved, and repackaged into partisan discourse is no longer worth risking one’s life for:
Covering wars for a polarized nation has destroyed the civic mission I once found in journalism. Why risk it all to get the facts for people who increasingly seem only to seek out the information they want and brand the stories and facts that don’t conform to their opinions as biased or inaccurate? And without a higher purpose, what is a career as a reporter? It may count among the so-called “glamor jobs” sought after by recent graduates, but one careers website has listed newspaper reporting as the second worst job in America, based on factors such as stress, pay, and employment uncertainty; toiling as a janitor, dishwasher, or garbage collector all scored better. Even if you love the work, it’s hard not to get worn down by a job that sometimes requires you to risk life and limb for readers who wonder if maybe you suffer all the downsides and hazards just to support some hidden agenda.
Yes and Better Together supporters exchange views with one another as Jim Murphy, Shadow Secretary of State for International Development (not seen), speaks on his soapbox during his “100 Towns in 100 Days” tour on August 27, 2014 in Dundee, Scotland. Mr. Murphy, Labour MP, is touring Scotland on behalf of the Better Together, spreading his message about the benefits of Scotland remaining part of the United Kingdom and informing the public of the risks that independence poses for the country. Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images.
Naava Mashiah finds that as some European Jews, fearing anti-Semitism, move to Israel, some Israeli Jews are moving in the opposite direction.
So I see two sectors of the Jewish population, one in the diaspora, one in Israel, which believe the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. You wonder whom is deceiving themselves and whom will actually follow through and make the move. Will the exodus from Israel be larger than the inflow of immigrants from Europe? Will the immigration from North America still continue to make up the gap? Even as I write this, after the beginning of the cease-fire, a plane has landed with a planeload of new immigrants.
The Israelis whom move to Europe, as I did four years ago, will find out that the policy of the Israeli government will inevitably affect their life in Europe, even a small remote village. For the local population will remind you that you are Jewish and therefore connected to this homeland. It really doesn’t matter whether or not you agree with the Israeli government’s policies. … Many in Europe say that it reminds them of Europe in 1936, and are reminded of those whom were proactive and departed, ending up as survivors. Some do not think we have reached such a drastic situation. While in Israel, it is no longer considered ‘against the stream’ to emigrate as it was in the 70’s when the immigrants were considered traitors to the country.
Here in the States, though, surely things are different, right? Perhaps for the most part – and anyone who thinks anti-Semitism is this country’s principal bigotry has been living under one of those proverbial rocks – but then there are moments like this, in response to a NYT story about rising European anti-Semitism:
To the Editor:
Deborah E. Lipstadt makes far too little of the relationship between Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza and growing anti-Semitism in Europe and beyond.
The trend to which she alludes parallels the carnage in Gaza over the last five years, not to mention the perpetually stalled peace talks and the continuing occupation of the West Bank.
As hope for a two-state solution fades and Palestinian casualties continue to mount, the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel’s patrons abroad to press the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question.
(Rev.) BRUCE M. SHIPMAN
Groton, Conn., Aug. 21, 2014
The writer is the Episcopal chaplain at Yale.
Permit me to spell out what makes a letter like this jump out. (And jump out it did, but there’s no way to link to personal Facebook pages here.) Shipman is not merely stating that there’s some relationship between tensions in the Middle East and anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe, but that poor behavior on the part of Israel excuses anti-Jewish acts in places other than Israel. He’s saying that Jews (sorry, “Israel’s patrons abroad” – nice little loophole of a possibility that he mostly means Evangelicals) are responsible for anti-Semitism, and have brought it upon themselves, as if the typical European (or, for that matter, American) Jew has some kind of influence on Netanyahu. Shipman, as David Bernstein points out in his posts on the letter, blames the victim. Shipman’s saying that if you’re in any sense a “patron” of Israel – a vague enough term that could, depending how one understands it, include nearly all Jews – you can expect continued bigotry until a permanent peace arrives in the Middle East, which is, dare I venture a guess, not imminent.
The reason a letter like this gets published in the NYT, and isn’t jumping out at everyone, is… basically what I was getting at earlier, namely that the commonplace definition of anti-Semitism excludes cases where a pretext is given. As in, there’s been this odd rounding-up, or rounding-down, or something, whereby it’s not just that we must recognize that criticism of Israel exists as a thing separate from anti-Semitism, as is sensible. It’s also that anti-Semitism somehow doesn’t count as such if it’s expressed by someone who also expresses legitimate criticisms. Which is, oh, maybe not so sensible if one stops and thinks about it.
A Klee painting named 
The Dish 