lost highway: back to the city of the patriarchs

The self-hater. it has nothing to do with Gunter Grass’s stupid poem. His meta argument that its not the state its the government, is hoary socialist cant from the left; a socialist attacking Zionism is a family squabble at best. Not much different from Harold Pinter. The same self-hatred that created Zionism still animates it between a yawn and a growl. Zionism as the incarnation of unconscious guilt; a convenient pretext for repudiating Jewish identity. The high art of literature and politics connecting assimilation to the broken faith of the Jewish tradition. Zionism, as Slavoj Zizek has said is doomed to fail as an effort in “normalizing” the Jew, a paradox that can’t be resolved; and by consequence, the nation state idea of Poles, English, Germans, Frenchmen etc. is also destined to crumble as well; since normalization is an act of repression that will be overthrown eventually. There is “something” that lies outside the purview of conventional thinking that eludes us, but is there, lurking, despite the best efforts to flatten, dilute and commodify to the best of our ability.

---One person was there who takes an extraordinary interest in every move of the “settlers.” Haaretz reporter Gideon Levy showed up with his notepad and a photographer, glaring at the busloads of Mishkefet visitors and at the group of IDF soldiers securing the property.---Read More:http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/look-whos-in-hebron-passover-2012/

There are hundreds of memorials to dead yids in Germany, and Grass is just another petty example of Jerries using Jews to mourn for them leaving them free to sink into the melancholy of a dead society, albeit prosperous.Let Grass bang out a dirge on his tin drum, and reify the Jews into German melancholy. German mourning was never really convincing for what they destroyed, and here we have Grass guiltily punishing himself for their deaths. Grass like a lot of them, excuse me, Grass was one of the “good” Nazis, y’know he liked art and stuff; one has the impression he really disliked them, and also felt they never really liked him either, even though they lived near him. He could never really get rid of them.

To be upbeat and joyous or downbeat and depressed like the self-hater? Even though it may seem Jewish to hate oneself and be blue in a menacing world, like perhaps Kafka, with the response of internalizing that negativity and transforming it emotionally as best as possible, understanding the effect on one and maybe surviving and outsmarting it. Maybe. The identification with the aggressor from which Zionism emerged, kind of a perverse fusion of Judaic rejection of images and idol worship , false gods, and reactionary modernisms ( Stalinism and Nazim’s rejection of the expressionistic and surrealistic ; with spirituality at best as a by-product of materialism.

---Can one say that Freud is taking Jewish revenge on Christian bodies? Do they become, in his unconscious fantasy, the Jewish bodies the Nazis dissolved into smoke, rationalizing their liquidation by objectifying them as human garbage, that is, disposable Untermenschen, as the Nazis called the non-Aryan Jews? Does this mean that Freud unconsciously identified with the anti-Semite aggressors, even as he expressed his contempt for them by victimizing them a disidentification, as it were? Many were still alive, outspoken, and prominent in England T. S. Eliot was one which, it may be recalled, is the place where the yellow star originated and the first place from which the Jews were expelled. The ambivalent Anglo-Jewish component in Freud’s mentality his sense of being a Jewish foreigner in English society, and thus just as uncomfortable himself as he wants to make his model remains to be thoroughly investigated.---Read More:http://www.artnet.de/magazine/shamesless-and-unashamed/

ADDENDUM:

Michael Salzhauer, also known as “Dr. Schnoz,” is igniting controversy for reinforcing stereotypes about the sizes of Jewish individuals’ noses. Salzhauer, who is currently under investigation, commissioned a music video about rhinoplasty a few months back that many people in the Jewish-American community see as inflammatory. The clip, which was performed by The Groggers, an Orthodox pop-punk band, deals with controversial subject matter….

---“If small, lithe tigers could speak, they would have the voice and intelligence of this feline Pole. He has velvet paws and killer talons of steel. He’s let his beard grow to cover up the fact that he is only half a man. His eyes are blue, the better to deceive…. His ambition, which is consuming, is to be recognized as the world’s greatest expert on the Italian primitives; and he achieved his goal about three years ago. He is a dying man, but he’ll go on for a long, long time. He doesn’t do business or accept commissions, but he shares in the profits. ‘Here are 25,000 francs, M. Berenson.’ ‘Merci, Gimpel.”’ This entry from the 1918 diary of the art dealer René Gimpel is the best thumbnail sketch of Bernard Berenson yet written. It was a curious fact of cultural life, and perhaps a tribute to the old serpent’s powers of intimidation, that nobody else could deal with him in such terms, catching his epicene grace, deviousness, hypochondria, greed, relentless ambition, and ophidian charm in a few lines.---Read More:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/dec/20/only-in-america/?pagination=false image:http://www.nga.gov/feature/chim/italy_page8.shtm

…The video highlights a young, Jewish man’s struggles over the size of his nose and his efforts to get the girl of his dreams. In the end, following a rhinoplasty procedure, the boy does, indeed, end up with a beautiful woman — a message that is certainly problematic for those encouraging young people to be themselves and to not conform to societal demands….

---Numerous artists and musicians came to pray and pay their respects to the historic city – and put on a concert for the masses. The spokesman for Hevron's Jewish community, Noam Arnon, commented on the recent eviction of fifteen families from Beit Hamachpela, The House of the Patriarchs. "Jews are not allowed to buy a home or new property in Hevron, the city of our forefathers," Arnon said. "What was permitted to Jews here for thousands of years is now forbidden." "Only three percent of the city is open to us, and we cannot purchase new houses," Arnon said, saying the eviction sent the wrong message to the entire world. Arnon said the community was, nonetheless, nonplussed. "Israel has had stronger claims to this historical place than anyone else for 4000 years." "We will continue to buy houses here and build homes, and to build the city of our fathers," he pledged.--- Read More:http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/154640#.T4RLhtVb76M

In exchange for the music video, Salzhauer apparently offered the band members free nose jobs. The lead singer took him up on the offer, which is evident in the video. Read More:http://www.theblaze.com/stories/jewcam-sam-video-about-nose-jobs-sparks-accusations-that-plastic-surgeon-is-a-self-hating-jew/
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Certainly some of the most unusual cases of Jewish “self-hatred” have been in recent times. In 1978 a group of Nazis led by a man named Frank Collin made national headlines with their plans to march through Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb populated with many Jews. Collin’s father (originally named Cohen) was a Jewish survivor of Dachau, a German concentration camp in World War II. In 1965, Daniel Burros, the King Kleagle of the New York Ku Klux Klan committed suicide when the New York Times exposed the fact that he was Jewish. Strangely, Burros knew another Burros, this one Robert, an activist in the far-right American Renaissance Party. Robert’s father was Jewish. Both men hid their Jewish backgrounds from each other.  (American Civil Liberties Union activist David Hamlin, in his personal account of the Skokie case, even notes another alleged Jewish  anti-Semite in New Hampshire — newspaper mogul “William Loeb [who] once headlined a front-page editorial about the the [Jewish] secretary of state ‘Kissinger the Kike.'” Another Jew, Benjamin Freedman, according to an investigation by the Anti-Defamation League, was active in “the right-wing anti-Semitic Christian nationalist crusade” of t

940s and Harold Von Braunhut was a supporter of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations in the 1980s.

Whatever you can say about Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria, they are not afflicted by Jewish self-hatred, and have no identity issues. Agree with them or not, they have 100% conviction in the Torah and convey a sense of purity and unbroken faith in Jewish tradition is almost unfathomable to the secular agenda. Image:http://www.hebron.com/english/

In 1966, Richard Wishnetsky grabbed a microphone from a rabbi at a bar mitzvah ceremony in Detroit, shouted that “This congregation is a travesty and abomination. It has made a mockery by its phoniness and hypocrisy the beauty and spirit of Judaism. It is composed of people who on the whole make me ashamed to say I am a Jew.” Wishnetsky then pulled out a gun and killed the rabbi and himself.

In England, a British Jewish novelist, Gilbert Frankeau, wrote an article in 1933 entitled, “As a Jew I Am Not Against Hitler.” In Russia, by the mid-1990s, the head of the right-wing nationalist Liberal Democrat Party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, was being wrote about as a potential “dictator.” His “ideas and behavior,” write Vladimir Solovpov and Elena Klepikova, “are often reminiscent of Hitler … [His] anti-Semitism is not like Hitler’s, but more like that of Karl Marx; that is, it is not visceral but theoretical.” Zhirinovsky’s father, Volf Isaakovich Eidelstein, was Jewish.

Some of the most sickening cases of “self-hatred,” if we are to believe Hannah Arendt, by deeply disturbed people, were in Nazi Germany. Nazi Field Marshall Erhard Milch was “generally known,” according to Arendt, to have been “half-Jewish,” as was Reinhard Heydrich, whose “Office of Jewish Emigration” organized the extermination of four million people, mostly Jews. Even Hans Frank, the merciless Nazi Governor General of Poland, in which the Holocaust largely occurred, says Arendt again, was “probably even a full Jew.” “The forty-two volume journal [Frank] kept of his life and works … was one of the most terrifying documents to come out of the dark Nazi world.” [SHIRER, p. 662] Read More:http://holywar.org/jewishtr/19antis2.htm

…And, of course, let’s not forget Jesus Christ, a Jew, (who, Messiah or not, rebelled against Jewish conventions of his time) and many of his early followers who were Jews, all apostates, and the long lineage of trouble that they have effectively caused upon those who never left the fold. “The founder [of Christianity],” notes R.J. Zwi Werblowsky in the Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, “and its early adherents were all Jews.”  “Like Jesus,” says M. H. Goldberg, “all the apostles were Jews, as was the first Pope. Jews wrote all of the books of the New Testament except for those written by Luke.”  It would seem that “anti-Semitism,” in the religious context, as it is presently conceived, was in its origins an in-house Jewish dialogue.( ibid.)
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This drive to become a Gentile at almost any cost was the fruit of real desperation: young Berenson experienced his race and origins as a Medusa’s head which could petrify his career at one glance. His social climbing, which looks so repellent and calculated, was inspired by the conviction that there was no way back. Proper Boston possessed the first culture he wanted to have; Jewishness was not a culture, only a point of origin, something to transcend by means of any available fiction. In his old age, Berenson would make peace with his childhood, becoming almost rabbinical. But for the first fifty years of his life he fought to overcome and repress it, so that the gifted shtetl boy was displaced by a more literary specter—the pale exile of conjectural but high origins, bestowing his allegiance only on Culture: a Childe Harold of the salons and museums. His pedigree could not impress Boston, but his credentials of feeling could. Read More:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/dec/20/only-in-america/?pagination=false
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Slavoj Zizek: It was thus at the very moment when Jews were deprived of their specific properties which made it easy to distinguish them from the rest of the population, and when the “Jewish question” was “resolved” at the political level by the formal emancipation of the Jews, i.e., by granting Jews the same rights as to all other “normal” Christian citizens, that their “curse” was inscribed into their very being – they were no longer ridiculous misers and usurers, but demoniac heroes of eternal damnation, haunted by an unspecified and unspeakable guilt, condemned to wander around and longing to find redemption in death. So it was precisely when the specific figure of the Jew disappeared that the ABSOLUTE Jew emerged, and this transformation conditioned the shift of anti-Semitism from theology to race: their damnation was their race, they were not guilty for what they did (exploit the Christians, murder their children, rape their women, or, ultimately, betray and murder Christ), but for what they WERE – is it necessary to add that this shift laid the foundations for the holocaust, for the physical annihilation of the Jews as the only appropriate final solution of their “problem”? Insofar as Jews were identified by a series of their properties, the goal was to convert them, to turn them into Christians; but from the moment that Jewishness concerns their very being, only annihilation can solve the “Jewish question.”Read More:http://www.lacan.com/zizbarabajal.html

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