Some Thoughts on "Marty Supreme"

 

1. Marty Mauser. The family name evokes Art Spiegelman’s breakthrough comic book treatment of the Holocaust, with its Nazi cats and Maus Jews. As a Survivor, Marty (Timothee Chalamet)  proves as indomitable in competitive humanity as in table tennis.
2. The first ping-pong ball tells it all. Under the hero’s name: “Made in America.” This hero is the hustler we met in What Makes Sammy Run, our Duddy Kravitz, etc., the aggressive, disturbing, unlikable but successful Jew that the classic noirs were afraid to present. He’s the American outsider who embraces and exploits his marginalization to get ahead. To grab his share. He refuses to be constrained by the social conventions that suppress him. He is driven to offensive self-assertion, to indecorum, to succeed in order to survive: “I’m Hitler’s worst enemy.” 
3. Why table tennis? As Marty introduces himself to the man he would cuckold, be humiliated by, then affront, “I’m an athlete.” But not the big macho athlete we expect —  not from the open court of “real” tennis, the outdoor, the rich, the clubs that banned Jews. This is the small domestic version where a Jew  might still loom large. A kitchen athlete.  
4. Then there’s the ball’s colour dynamic. Tournament players are required to wear black so that the white ball won’t be lost against a white background. Not to be lost in the background, to maintain one’s individuation — that’s also the Jew’s larger determination of selfhood. He's not of the "Sha, sha- shtum" persuasion. Here the hero’s table tennis skill gives him that shot. In developing an alternative colour Marty finds an alternative means to avoid that disappearance.”It’s the Marty Supreme Ball, not the Marty Normal Ball.” 
5. This Jew acknowledges and exploits the antisemitism that ineluctably awaits. “I can say that because I’m Jewish,” he wraps up an antisemitic joke: ”I’m going to do to Kletzky (Beza Rohrig) what Auschwitz couldn’t.”  By stealing the bigot’s trope he inoculates himself against the pain, as did Dick Gregory’s title Nigger. 
6. Then there are The Women. Marty’s true match is the homey, loving, earthy, dark Jewish — indeed Biblical — Rachel (Odessa A’zion). Her he has impregnated then fled. He discovers she has a drive, resourcefulness and energy that match his. Their baby solidifies them and him.
7. In the interim he is tempted away by that trad status symbol, the blonde shicksa goddess. That appeal, challenge, against-all-odds self-affirmation, trap his fantasy and lead him up the blind alley of mutual exploitation. Here Marty realizes his — albeit modified — ambition to defeat the Japanese champ who had defeated him. Banned from the tournament he manages an outside revenge win,. But only through his first suffering the goddess’s husband’s humiliating abuse and then breaking from him.
8. The Nazis had saved the older ping pong champion, Bela Kletzky’s life, then set him to defuse bombs. Not the sinecure a hero might expect as an admiring reward, but for a Jew.… In the film’s most compelling scene, that Jew follows pestering bees to their hive, smokes them out, then covers his body with honey — not for himself, of course, but for his fellow inmates to lick off! The fact that this story is true does not diminish its power as a metaphor. Sweet are the uses of adversity, indeed. 
9. There’s an essay just in what that incident reveals about the prisonerss’ suffering, indeed that of all the Jews, the camaraderie and sustenance the Jews there — and in general  —need to survive. And after all, what are the real sport stars but our source of vicarious satisfaction to help us forget our inadequacy? The honey over our bitter disappointments. Logically, however absurd, the Japanese crave their hero’s ping pong triumph over the American to avenge their WW II loss.
10. The lost dog subplot replays the central thrust. In plot he’s a possible tributary to get Marty back to Japan for what he thinks will be his redemption. The rich hoarder is as compelled to recover his Moses as Marty is his table supremacy. As the Old Testament name evokes foundational Jewry, the final conflagration ironically recalls the burning bush that fired man’s discovery of his God. 
11. So Marty is crooked, compulsive, nakedly ambitious, cruel, dislikable. This Mauser is also a mamzer (bastard). But nothing seriously criminal, just nervy. Chutzpah. His most criminal act is chipping off a piece of a pyramid in Egypt. But history absolves him. He gifts it to his mother: “We built it.” Justice may not always be blind but it is often ironic. That’s poetic.
12. Film feeds on life, as vice versa.  As the long-absent-from-the-stage aging star Kay Stone (as in heart of), Safdie cast long-absent-from-the-screen aging star Gwyneth Paltrow, who wins much respect by playing this unrespectable egotist. Enjoyably resurrected are the once current Fran Drescher and Sandra Bernhard as Mausers. The star’s stage director is played by playwright/director David Mamet. In the most interesting casting, the actress’s sleazy husband, Milton Rockwell, is played by Kevin O’Leary. The Canadian is best known as a hustler on two TV series, Shark Tank and Dragons Den, where he was a panelist cashing in on young talent. IMDB calls him “Canada’s Donald Trump,” but O’Leary can act.
13. As Marty is disappointed when his stolen necklace proves costume jewelry, its owner  Ms Stone heartbreak from the reviews of her return to the stage. Only that grief prevents her from giving Marty a real necklace to sell.. 
14. As the continuing Middle East war — should — remind us, the Jew stands for life against the death cult of radical Islam. Thus Josh Safdie’s tough guy hero ends up weeping at the sight of his baby son. Indeed that sight even charms away the infant’s tears as it may free ours.. 

Some thoughts on Hamnet

1. This feminist approach to Shakespeare’s life tells us nothing about the real Anne Hathaway but freshly reminds us of the playwright’s importance. This Hathaway has no apparent effect on his work — nor even an understanding of it. Her first — and climactic — experience of theatre — she’s unfamiliar with even the basics of casting and roles —  reminds us that he’s the first modern dramatist. Indeed, Harold Bloom says Shakespeare invented human nature by imagining humans as we know them, defined by thought, word and action, of an unprecedented complexity and resonance.
2. This film’s feminism lies in the rich characterization invented for Anne — or Agnes here. Names, indeed words in general, were at the time fluid in spelling and meaning. Anne/Agnes parallels Hamlet/Hamnet. Indeed there were even a dozen ways to spell Shakespeare. (Don’t know how many for Will.) This Agnes is totally invented as a pagan spirit — daughter of a witch, learned in herbs, determined to pop her children in the wilds. She commands a hawk. This character places Shakespeare at the turning point from the primitive to the modern. He is sensitive to both pagan and modern. So while he lives in a humble London garret he moves his family from their primitive cottage to “the largest house in Stratford” (It actually was only the second largest. But enough about unreal estate). When the twins are born the son seems lifeless till Agnes brings him to life — as Will will onstage, to her profound growth from affront to joy. 
3. Anne’s world is coarse, wild, dirty. She has a one-colour wardrobe, dirty nails (like, shrewdly, the whole cast. But alas, her teeth are too good for the period). Where Will will find his expression and insight in words she pours out screams. This marriage makes Shakespeare the pivot from the old coarse world to the modern. His genius lies in apprehending and appreciating the primitive while advancing beyond it. He recognizes and adopts her wild energy.
4. The real Agnes (preggers) married 18-year-old Will when she was 26. The film shrinks that gap romantically. In our world she might have babysat him. (I made 15 cents an hour.) She could have been the most inspiring sitter before Paul Anka’s Diana — but Shakespeare never wrote about her. We’re not even sure he wrote poems to her. Indeed he abandoned his family to create in London. Absented himself from that felicity, a wile, one might say. Only to return to it in grief. 
5. Of course, the entire film can be wound out of the opening shot. The camera pans down what appear to be two dark, thin but real trees — one straight and pure, the other bent, gnarled, kinky. They’re revealed to be branches off the same trunk, which at the bottom reveals even more churning, wild roots. This living organism might be read as a variety of binaries. Art/nature. Drama/life. Male/female. Old/new. Pure/impure. Energetic/calm. Wild/tamed. Active/passive. In some those binaries might be reversed: the straight limb could be either the male or the female. Nature might better be the twisted wild branch, art the straight. Or vice versa. The real tree at the beginning is matched by the backdrop of equally thin but regular painted trees on stage at the end. This art is the flattening of that life. That replays all the binaries from the beginning, but flattened and false. Also, alien to the court setting of the scene.
6. Anent the looseness of spelling and language — this Hamlet yearns to melt his “solid” flesh. Ok. An alternative text spells it “sullied,” making for a richer reading. For the “solid” is already incipient in the “melt.” “Sullied” adds Hamlet’s recoil from his physical being (“or not to be”). 
7. The production we see omits the play’s real ending — the stabilizing invasion by Fortinbras (“strong in arms”). With the focus on Agnes discovering how theatre can address, enrich, even discover her own life, Fortinbras is unimportant. The film prefers to close on the audience joining her emotional union with the actor.  
8. There are two problems with the assumption that the play Hamlet grew out of Shakespeare’s intense loss of his same-name son. The association is tempting not just because of the names but from Shakespeare’s examination of grief, the responsibilities that bind father and son, even beyond the grave, and that old “To be or not to” dilemma. In the revenge theme Shakespeare may rather have drawn from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy than from his own emotional condition.
9. The second issue may invite fuller consideration. Unlike the film’s direct turn from the life tragedy to Hamlet, between his son’s death (1596) and that play (1600) Shakespeare churned out The Merchant of Venice (1596–1597), Henry IV, Part 1 and 2 (1597–1598), Much Ado About Nothing (1598–1599), Henry V (1598–1599), Julius Caesar (1599–1600), As You Like It (1599–1600) and Twelfth Night (1599–1600). Maybe there’s a PhD. thesis awaiting someone’s development of the son’s loss through that sequence.
10. So are novelist Maggie O’Farrell and director Chloe Zhao to be faulted for imposing this feminist testament on our Will? Not at all. Novelists and directors are entitled to their own poetic licence. But more important: Shakespeare earned that respect. Here is a respectful acknowledgment of his unprecedented representation of rich, complex women in his world, in his plays. Though played by boys his women are realistic glories. His Cleopatra dwarfs both Antony and Caesar. Juliet dims Romeo. Indeed, Coriolanus’s mother may well be the tragic “hero” of his play. Desdemona is Othello’s equal as his “fair warrior” as Macbeth’s Lady is his. Portia’s power and intelligence make her the moral — and suspect — counterpoint to Shylock more than the titular Antonio is. The feminist center in this fantasy of a bio is justified by even this modernity already established in the Shakespeare canon. It’s just another way that Shakespeare is — as Jan Kott put it — our contemporary.

"Speaking as a Jew...."

      Speaking as a Jew, I never start a sentence with “Speaking as a Jew.”

Well, maybe this once.

Here’s why. Any wisdom I presume to impart should derive out of my knowledge, experience and values as a human being. It may or may not be informed by my Jewishness. But it should stand solid without depending upon that credential. If my argument needs that identification then it is not as strong as it should be. If it needs that identity crutch it is suspect. Probably wrong, as the fashionable and facile tend to be.

Of course, you don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate rye bread. Or wry humour. Nor need you be Jewish to appreciate the wisdom and balance of the IHRA definition of the current dominant form of that historic pathology, antisemitism.

To refresh your memory: Criticizing Israeli government policy is not in itself antisemitism. Policy is debatable -- but humanity should not be. 

It is antisemitic to hold the Jewish state to standards not applied to all other states, denying Israel’s legitimacy and the right to defend herself, blaming world Jewry for Israeli government policy, etc. That makes sense with or without the IHRA validation.

For what other state under attack has ever been required to feed and to protect its genocidal enemy at the mortal risk of its own innocents?

Where/when else has the world supported the establishment of a new state explicitly dependent upon the annihilation of an existing one? That’s what “From the river to the sea” means. So, too, the Palestinians’ unilateral rejection of the two-state solution in 1948 and through six land-for-peace offers since.

What other North American community — eg British, French, Italian, Russian — faces abuse and existential threat because of its international association? Yes, the Japanese suffered it through WW II, but didn't we learn from that?

Guess not. Each generation breeds a new antisemitism. As wrong as the old.

The persecution rests.

When an argument needs “Speaking as a Jew” I can draw only one conclusion. The speaker’s position cannot stand alone. It needs that special plea, an extra authority. By implication, the speaker claims special rights to detach from that IHRA definition and its currency. It usually introduces some antisemitic twist.

The obvious reason is what the sociologists have a name for — so it exists. “Group self-hate.” For whatever reason, whether shame, guilt, ambition, ignorance of history, the speaker seeks special exemption from that identification. E.g,. I'm not like the other Jews, who blame the Palestinians for martyring their own children and militarizing their hospitals. No, blame the Jews. Or, the invasion, rape and slaughter of October 7 was anti colonialism! Those upstart invader Jews. I'm with you bigots, not with -- suffer --Them.

    It’s also a false claim of authority. As a Jew, the implicit statement goes, I know better than what the IHRA has said and is being cited for here. But if this Jew goes maverick, so should you.

Jews do have a nobler version: “tikkun olam.” The essential duty to improve the world. This probably propels most Jews’ attempts to detach from the defence of Israel against annihilation.

Hence the movement whose name assumes a rhetorical question on Palestinian statehood: “If not now, when?”

Speaking as a responsible human being, I would say there is an obvious answer: “When the Palestinians have demonstrated they have abandoned their explicit campaign to eliminate the Jews.”

I should not have to be a Jew to see and to say that. But Jews in the “If not now when?” movement are in effect if not in intention supporting the elimination of the Jews. Statehood now, ending the genocide of the Jews ... well, let's hope, later. 

    There lies our Prime Minister Carney’s (inter alia) unfortunate, naive regnition of Palestinian statehood, in the face of the October 7 atrocities and continuing Palestinian intransigence. That only encourages Hamas and its jihadist brethren.

    There's another, historic precedent for the "speaking as a Jew" traitor. "Useful idiots" -- Lenin's term for the activist Leftie whose idealism blinded them to the atrocities Stalin committed in their name. Many were Jews. We invented the Left. Apparently we also invented the ersatz idealism of the turncoat.

  Speaking as a relatively observant advocate of humanity, I see artists, galleries, major media museums, writers, editorialists, governments, universities, bodies from the UN down and beyond, Jewish individuals and groups, accepting antisemitism on a scale unseen since 1930s Germany. That nightmare now appears to have become a playbook. 

One should not have to be “speaking as a Jew” to see and to oppose that.

Nor should “speaking as a Jew” advance it.

The Road Between Us

  Barry Avrich’s documentary is a truly must-see film. First, it’s as engrossing a drama as any self-respecting novelist could devise. But mainly, it’s a unique and welcome alternative to the Jew-hating coverage of the Gaza war that our campuses, mass media and even governments have been promoting.

The film centers on one Israeli family’s experience when the Palestinians invaded their kibbutz on October 7, 2023. The central family, a couple and their two young girls, hide in their safe rooms while Hamas runs rampant outside. Retired Israeli General Noam Tibon rushes to their aid, pausing en route to save other Israeli civilians and soldiers. 

The war is kept a backdrop to that action. Avrich includes attack footage taken by Hamas body cameras, clips of news coverage, and shots of the corpse-strewn roads. But we are spared the attack’s worst atrocities — the rapes, dismemberment, torture, infanticide and the Palestinians’ celebration of them. 

Wisely, Avrich chose not to sensationalize the story with those atrocities. They would have made watching the film difficult for anyone not celebrating the Palestinian terrorism. Such an unbearable film wouldn’t hit the cinemas. I won’t even mention the popcorn sales. 

Anyway, people who remember that recent history are thus spared the horror. Those already seduced by Palestinian propaganda would be unlikely to change their minds by being reminded of them. They are too eager to believe Hamas and to condemn the Jews’ existential self-defence. Even now, Israel is fighting — careful to minimize enemy civilian losses — to prevent Hamas’s promised repetition of that attack “throughout Israel and the West Bank.” But in the latest revival of that centuries-old mass pathology, the Jews ares considered the villain.

While the plot drives the film two serious distinctions are implicitly drawn between the Palestinian and the Israeli cultures. The first is the Jews’ commitment to their children, Noam and his wife risk their lives to rescue their adult son and grandchildren. The young family’s survival ultimately depends on the young girls mustering the heroic silence. This implicitly contrasts to the Palestinians’ willing sacrifice of their own children, as shields, suicide bombers, teenage soldiers, hungry for their martyrdom. Which they then bewail and blame on Israel.

The second emerges from all the scenes in the family’s safe room. Every house in the kibbutz has one, a concrete and metal check against Palestinian rockets, grenades and bombs. The construction is intended to survive. 

In Gaza the government built a massive web of tunnels, dedicated to attacking Israeli civilians and to storing weapons, food and facilities just for their soldiers. Under Israeli fire, civilians were forbidden their security. Of course , those tunnels under hospitals, temples, schools, playgrounds, areas thus militarized, disqualified them from the “safety” promised in wartime. None of this has diminished the global condemnation of Israel’s war to survive,

The Edward Murrow frame provides the historical context of the Palestinians’ 75-year campaign to eliminate the Jews, rejecting all statehood offers that would deny that. 

In addition to the emotional address, there is a lot of beauty and poetry here. For example, this one brief shot — a few ants scamper into a dark hole in concrete. It lasts but a few seconds but it could be the heart of the film. Life, in its simplest, smallest, most anonymous form, manages to find shelter, life, hope, in a dark hole in unfeeling, unyielding concrete. That shot embodies the contrast between the Jews’ dedication to life and the Palestinians’ embrace of death.   

My Updated Column on Antisemitism at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

 Beth Stuart’s Delibels, at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, is an extremely concerning exhibition not for what it says but for what it is — artfully coded antisemitism. All the more reprehensible for its coyness.

The art pieces are enigmatic, engaging. In each, a black ledge of replicas tops a long black mesh. The objects — fabricated seeds, fruit, pizza crusts, nuts — suggest the relics of the once edible, the spectral word within the title — but now not-indelible. The nourishing solids have become transitory, passing, forgettable. Each piece poses a once-digestible solidity on a wavering base.

What’s problematic is the full-wall text — in spectral grey — that accompanies the sculptures. Stuart interweaves Luther Burbank, the history of some berries, nuts and phrases, with three cases of supposed genocide: the Armenian, the alleged Palestinian and finally our Residential Schools. As a whole, the work may contrast the self-renewal of nature’s produce with humans’ murderousness. The Palestinian focus, a friend suggests, adds a more accurate echo to the title: libels. The work is an implicit endorsement of the Hamas attack on Israel on October7, 2023. So one-sided is her perspective that she does not mention Hamas even once.

Stuart precisely echoes the allegations of Jewish genocide, infanticide and illegal oppression of the Palestinians that an as yet unidentified vandal wrote on the outside wall of Congregation Emanu-el, the Victoria synagogue (the oldest operating in Canada). Police plan to charge the vandal with hate speech and incitement to violence — if they ever get around to identifying and catching him. All they have is a video of him. AGGV appears unperturbed that their platformed artist’s statement parallels that yob’s.

* * *

Of course the term “genocide” — here first used re: the Armenians — was coined in reference to the Holocaust. It means the deliberate attempt to annihilate a people. One example: the Gazans’ elected government, Hamas, is constitutionally pledged (Article 7) to eliminate WORLD Jewry. Here’s another: in 1948 Israel accepted the two-state solution but the Arabs instead launched their continuing war to eliminate the Jews. There have since been eight land-for-peace offers (six by Israel), all rejected by the Palestinians, without discussion. They demand a statehood that would replace not join Israel.

In short, genocide for the Palestinians is not a plight but their platform. As Stuart revives Goebbels’ “big lie” he must be chortling in his grave.

The Palestinian claim is also an affront to the frame of the two real victims of genocide. Incidentally, a large delegation of Canada’s indigenous leaders recently visited Israel to express their support. Knowing the Jews occupied these contested lands 2,000 years before the Koran launched Islam, the Jews are their model in across centuries surviving colonial oppressors, ultimately to reclaim their land, language and identity. Later Stuart parallels the Canadian government waste of a million dollars supervising a protest — against ending the Kamloops burial search — with Canada’s financial support of Israel’s self-defence. Israel parallels the indigenous not the wasteful oppressors.

Stuart first mentions the Jews as a threat on the Armenian border, then by implication responsible for their population drop from 27,000 to 1,000 in Old Jerusalem. No, the Jews did not slaughter the Armenians. They were, however, reluctant to let the later term “genocide” refer back to them, however, given the uniqueness of scale that the Nazis launched — and that Hamas intends.

Then the Palestinians are Israel’s innocent victims: “I saw a social media post in November 2023 that showed someone opening an aid truck in the Gaza Strip and it was full of thousands of white shrouds. Not food or medicine.” 

Though the professor does cite her scholarly (?) source she omits the obvious cause of that Palestinian inconvenience. Just weeks earlier — their government Hamas’s October 7 attack that killed over 1,200 people, mainly civilians, including innocents at a music festival, abducted 251, and indulged in a fury of torture, rape and mutilation — that they and the Gazan citizenry celebrated. They made exultant videos of their atrocities.

Hamas pledged to repeat that attack throughout Israel and the West Bank. Ignoring that detail, Stuart blames Israel for the aggressor Palestinians’ ensuing difficulties, like shortages of clean and desalinated water, medicine, food, etc. And their crop of shrouds.

Indeed she blames Israel for all the Palestinians’ suffering, especially the self-inflicted. Palestinians not Israelis set those forest fires (with no loss of Green Party support). Since 1948 the deaths, expulsions/departures and losses all resulted from the Palestinians’ choice of war over peaceful coexistence with the Jews.

Again ignoring October 7, Stuart revives the centuries-old blood libel against the Jews: They want to kill your children! Even when they don’t need Christian blood for their matzo.

She cites a possibly Jewish “pundit” on Israeli TV Channel 14 in an “early 2024…. clip… saying every Palestinian over the age of four years is a potential terrorist and a necessary target of war.” So her sculptures’ mesh bags are the “Because they’re the size of a four-year-old child. That quoted statement does seem monstrous — until you recall its context.

First, to represent Israel she chose the right wing news, politics and satire channel that even in Israel is considered extremist. Second, regarding October 7 a Hamas spokesman flatly stated “There are no civilians in Israel” — i.e., only targets in war. In fact a captured Nukhba solider told Shin Bet he’d been instructed to kill Israeli children “because they’ll grow up to become soldiers.” Among their many child victims was one infant whom Hamas reportedly microwaved to death in front of its parents. Twin infants taken hostage were murdered. When Stuart attributes this monstrous “morality” to Israel, she not only blames the victim but charges them with doing what they suffered. This is intellectual dishonesty beyond the liberty of art.

Third, Stuart’s allegation of extreme child abuse actually is true — but is a charge properly laid against the Palestinians. As Hamas has militarized their hospitals, schools, playgrounds, mosques — thus inviting their wartime attack — they have even more callously weaponized their own children. Their martyrdom culture encourages and rewards the very deaths of their children that they then bewail and blame upon Israel. Parents send their children to summer day camps to train as soldiers. Their schools — abetted by the UNRWA — continue to teach their children to hate and to kill the Jews.

Golda Meir’s sad prophecy still holds: “We won’t have peace until the Arabs decide they love their own children more than they hate us.” The West’s reflex to blame Israel for the Gaza children’s deaths only encourages that vile abuse to continue. As does Stuart. Our “progressives” have that blood on their hands.

This widespread antisemitism has a clear cause. A world with 57 Moslem states, not one a democracy, cannot tolerate the existence of one slender sliver of a Jewish state — that is. While the October 7 savagery initially appalled the civilized world, within days — before Israel even began its response — there was an eruption of aggressive support — for Palestine! The slogans — From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, Globalize the intifada — implicitly called for the elimination of the Jewish state, the latter for Jews here too. Israel proven vulnerable, antisemitism internationally erupted unbridled.

Today we witness attacks upon Jews and Jewish institutions unseen since the Nazis. It’s as if the October 7 barbarity made antisemitism fashionable again. The recently unspeakable can now be yelled. A Toronto teacher can tell a six-year-old girl that because she’s only half-Jewish she’s only half animal. So we find the absurdity of Queers for Palestine, like Feminists, Christians, Artists, all campaigning against Israel — their sole defender in the region — and for an ethos that does persecute and would annihilate them. Regrettably the press, many governments and many arts organizations have bought into that folly. Now add AGGV.

Only at the end does Stuart finally acknowledge the October 7 barbarism. She celebrates it!

Early Stuart cited the invasive Himalayan blackberry which Burbank brought from Armenia, whose slaughter was cited as an historic precedent.of the Jewish one. It’s thus an emblem of genocide. When she finally addresses the October 7 slaughter it’s to plant a new generation, like her blackberries, a hardy new crop — planted to eliminate the Jews. “For the second spring since October 7, 2023, the blackberry hedges are blooming.” Ah, yes, more October 7s to come. This last one worked so well against the Jews. The blackberry blackness of the dead materials is her harbinger of hope, a perverse fertility.

The Gallery has issued a defence. Its pretence to the rich ambiguity of a work of art is irrelevant because Stuart’s art is the sculptures. The problem is the destructive distortion of history in her statement, her polemic. No ambiguity in her position, just a warping of history.

Today’s cultural assault on the Jews is a clear revival of 1930s Germany. Here’s the compelling difference: We know what resulted then. Some then may have feared what might follow. We know what did. Yet we have willingly gone back there, on the street and in the art gallery. 

If Stuart does not know better the AGGV should. Their visitors and their supporters deserve better than to be nourished on poison. From May 24-October 26 their visitors are being unwittingly injected with this prejudice. This Gallery leaves the dire prospect of a much Lesser Victoria.

In fact, the large pro-Palestinian (i.e., anti-Jewish) demonstration that — illegally — throttled Victoria’s downtown last Saturday afternoon — with police protection, of course — darkens our prospect even more. 

My September 11 Memory: My Darling Clementine

  We all have them. Some of us have them. Our September 11 memories.

Brock University. I was just back from sabbatical. First class. Scheduled film to introduce shot-by-shot analysis: John Ford's My Darling Clementine. A three-hour class on a 90-odd minute flick.
It's an accessible popular genre film -- just right to show how much can be pulled out of what seems simple. That was my thinking.
Students and faculty were up on the 13th floor and in the cafeteria and in residences and some halls glued to tv's. I'm trying to shift my focus from that reality screen to the one impending in class. Hard.
The class meets. I open with an obvious acknowledgment of what we should really be thinking about instead. How our world will never be the same again. That we've been radically shaken in our confidence of a future.
But we're here, in a class, and perhaps the analytic skills we use on a film -- yes, even an old Western -- may be just what we need now and tomorrow more than ever.
But I'm feeling a little guilty that I picked this film as a starter. Haven't watched it for a while but remembered it as both rich and ready, accessible.
Now it seems mainly escapist. The simple days of the Old West, amiable virtue in Henry Fonda, the innocent America.
Then the comic relief kicks in. The town drunk, Indian Charlie, is running wild in the saloon. Sheriff Earp (of whom I'm Fonda) has to go restore global order. Simple. Strides in, kicks him in the pants, out the door.
Wham -- we're in the new reality. The "Indian Charlie" as unrestrained threat immediately provokes our sense of historic racial discrimination and dehumanization. But today he's more than what we called pre-civilized. He's the terrorist. The disrupter of order. And he's an enemy from within.
So there we went. The comic margin took us anew to the political/philosophic heart of the film. We weren't imposing a political context om Ford, because his Westerns are rich in that. We found a new, immediate currency there.
I hope I didn't credit myself with foresight.

Antisemitism is Not About the Jews

 

I have friends who care for Israel but soften their criticism with “If only they had better public relations.” 

Israel has the best public relations in the world. 

They are responsible citizens of the world. Whenever there is a disaster Israel offers to send help. The Arab nations usually refuse but Israel offers. That’s the nation’s humanity, often denied. The 57 Muslim nations in the world can’t bear the thought of being helped by that one sliver of a Jewish state — because that might justify its existence. 

The Palestinians got the chance to prove themselves responsible citizens when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Instead they smashed up the greenhouse industry left them and proceeded to launch attacks on Israeli civilians, prompting the embargo that has chafed them since. But whether against Jews or Christians, apparently Muslim terrorism doesn’t damage their image. Good PR?

One might also claim PR value in Israel’s remarkable contributions to medicine, science, tech, agronomy, the arts, etc.. Especially when they have had to spend so much money and human power simply to defend its existence against surrounding mortal enemies throughout their brief state life. Just last week they revealed a revolutionary method of spinal transplant —the latest of hundreds of breakthroughs Israel has shared. 

By the way, there was no outside outcry when a major Israeli science center was bombed by Hamas. But hit a Palestinian hospital openly dedicated to military use and terrorist salvation? Israel is Evil.

Or this for PR? Even amidst an all-out attack from their genocidal enemies Israel still gives full free medical services to that enemy officers’ families. Or this: a convicted murderer serving a life sentence has a mortal brain tumour removed by an Israeli doctor. The patient may have been grateful, but when he was released in one of those imbalanced swaps — e.g., one Israeli hostage for 100 criminal Palestinians —that prisoner proceeded to plan and direct the October 7 invasion, slaughter and atrocities. Of course there was outrage when an Israeli rocket killed him.

Or this for PR: Retired British Officer Richard Kemp has called Israel the most moral army ever, for its care to minimize enemy civilian deaths. The civilian death rate is also extremely low for an urban ground war. 

        How does that translate? Israel is waging genocide and infanticide against those pathetic victim Palestinians. Israel is accused of doing what its ostensible victims are actually doing to them — while intending even worse. This is the point in Beth Stuart's inflammatory statement in her exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

Israel saves enemy lives by advance warning of attack to enable their flight to safety. So? Israel is condemned for forced evacuations. 

Nothing can excuse Israel because what Israel is and what Israel does are irrelevant to the Jews being useful — century after century — to bear the guilt and responsibility for everything awry in the world. Why look within when you can blame them?

Israel’s success in staving off Hamas’s two-year genocidal attack is making the Jewish state even more a pariah. Its critics swell in rage and number. But we should not blame Israel for that. Attacking a scapegoat responds to the society’s needs more than the nature of the imputed villain. And when the Jews have been demonized for centuries, who better to assail when occasion arises?

For antisemitism really has nothing to do with the Jews. Indeed, you don’t need Jews to have antisemitism. Indonesia has Few Jews and Much Antisemitism. The Jews’ ill-reputation doesn’t precede them. It’s a figurative substitute for their real being. 

Antisemitism is wholly irrational. The scapegoat it provides needs no factual basis or pertinence. It’s a historical pathology that periodically takes hold and drives the community to madness. There is no logic, no foundation and certainly no positive effect in a society suddenly blaming the Jews for its ills. 

Note that the calls to end the current war are primarily directed at Israel, not at the instigator and primary continuer, Hamas. The world blames Israel for the phantom famine, the physical destruction, the civilian and especially children’s deaths. But that is all due to Hamas violating war conventions by militarizing their supposedly safe areas — schools, playgrounds, temples, hospitals — and hiding their own soldiers among their civilian population. 

Yet Israel is considered the primary transgressor — for its existential self-defence. Occasionally we get an afterthought, like “free the hostages.” And “Islamophobia” quickly follows any politician’s courageous mention of “antisemitism” — as if there were any equivalence between the historic hatred of the Jews and the current coinage intended to defuse any criticism of radical Islam. The Left media are particularly prone to this pervasive prejudice. Typically, the CBC reports Hamas casualty figures as coming from “Gaza health officials.” But Israeli stats are “not confirmed by other sources.” 

This persists despite the innumerable exposure of Palestinian lies. Remember that hospital that Israel bombed at the current war’s onset, killing 500? Of course, it was a misfired Palestinian rocket, toll around 50, but the myth and eager gullibility persist. Hamas is like Trump in cruelty, selfishness and constant lying. Canada’s submission threatens a future no better than theirs. 

Little wonder Israel is so demonized — for daring to prevent Hamas’s pledge to repeat their October 7, 2023, atrocities “throughout Israel and the West Bank.” The “genocide” label is hung on the Jewish army’s self-defence instead of on Hamas’s constitutional pledge (Article 7) to eradicate world Jewry. Israel accepted the 2-state solution in 1948. The Palestinians did not. They also rejected eight land-for-peace offers since (six by Israel), without negotiation,  insisting on a statehood that would eliminate the Jews. 

Yet the world hangs the “genocide” tag on the Jews’ selfdefense. 

The primary solution now proposed is that Israel stop the war. France, Britain and Canada (alas!) have in effect promised to reward Hamas by recognizing Palestinian statehood in the fall sitting of the UN. 

        Set aside that this would make October 7 the primary modus operandi for jihadist movements throughout the world. 

Set aside that this would — indeed already has — hardened the Hamas resolve not to make any concessions re:hostages, truce, vacating the land. Even set aside that this promise could have little positive realization because the Palestinians fall obviously short on the major requirements of a new statehood. Even then, this promise can only compel Israel to ratchet up its attacks now in hope of reducing the military and political antagonism then to be consolidated. 

There’s yet one more lesson in October 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel, murdered over a thousand, kidnapped, raped, mutilated, microwaved a baby and through it all shot their own videos to celebrate. Palestinians applauded ecstatically. 

Briefly Jews felt some rare sympathy from the world at large. Then within days — before Israel even began its response to the attack — there was an eruption of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, encampments, etc., on our campuses as well as on defaced walls,. Their slogans called for the annihilation of Israel — indeed, even of the Jews outside  (“Bring the Intifada”). 

Antisemitism has nothing to do with the Jews —except their historic targeting. What they are, what they do, how they react, nohow are they responsible for the resurrection of that historic hysteria, that global pathology — antisemitism. 

Its root? Here’s a possibility. Hitler was asked if anything he did ever disturbed his conscience. “No, conscience is something invented by the Jews,” he replied. Enough said. Our ancient forefathers refined our godhood and passed on, inter alia, the ten commandments. Reason enough to draw eternal resentment — and worse.