World

Martyrs Then and Now

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Florida without sunshine is like a cup of bad coffee or scrambled eggs without salt or pepper, but we were stuck down there in the cold and the drizzle. To break the monotony my companion and I took a sleek little commuter train from Fort Lauderdale to Miami, with two amusements in mind — a seafood restaurant on the Miami River (Garcia’s: five stars!) and The Bay of Pigs Museum.

I think it could be easily argued that Florida itself has served as a laboratory where the agenda and tactics of our current administration were tested — from the cowardly war on woke, to epic grifting. It’s a state full of people who moved there because of the weather, a reason for relocation I find bewildering. I asked one old guy — he was my age! — if he missed his friends back in Boston, and he laughed and said he liked to think of them pulling their hats down to cover their ears while they shoveled their sidewalks. You would rather wear shorts than see your friends? I countered. Ab-so-fucking-lutely he replied.

Along with the sundowners you’ve got your Cubans. There are so many things that make Florida unappealing, it would be unfair and inaccurate to pin the woeful current state of affairs on Miami’s Cuban exile population, but once the Cubans left their expropriated fincas behind and repatriated to Miami, Florida suddenly had a reliable reactionary voting bloc that no ambitious politician could ignore.

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Co-Existentialism

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GAZA,1974

I

After dinner with the grandmother –
young wives of the household
are feeding children
and serving dessert to the men.

I am a guest, an English teacher
new to the Middle East,
without even the basic Arabic
most Israelis know
and I cannot play in pantomime –
like my daughter –
with the children and the goats.

I am placed in a bare room
with an old woman
who talks continually
as if eventually
I must understand
her native tongue

Because we are women.

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Co-Existentialism II (Addendum on relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel)

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I really didn’t want to write a piece for First of the Month about Arabs and Jews. Every article I’ve read talks about the terrible discrimination – even hatred – and I am burnt out on hatred and stereotypes. I’d asked Hillel Shenker what he felt about the change in relations between Arabs and Jews and he listed the organizations working for cooperation, and how there’s less in some organizations and more in others.

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Voices from the Diaspora (Haaretz Podcast)

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Click on the Haaretz podcast below and you’ll find that all the speakers are worth a listen. If your time is tight, though, cut directly to Masha Gessen (at 14:20) who upholds a primary truth that’s often evaded by those who rightly condemn soft-headed, hard-hearted Israel-is-Over triumphalism (especially in the wake of October 7th). Gessen puts the cruelty of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians on the West Bank first.

What Was It Like Being Jewish Outside Israel in 2024: Franklin Foer, Masha Gessen, Tony Kushner and More – Podcasts – Haaretz.com

So Fortunate to Be Ill (From “Standing Voiceless and other Stories of Resilience”)

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Erella Dunayevsky’s stories evoke the dailiness of Palestinians’ lives under occupation. They take place over many years but, as Dunayevsky has written, “the essence of the stories is identical, whether they took place during the nineties of the previous century or are happening right now.”

Erella composed this epistolary story on February 19, 2008…

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The museum as important as the Parthenon (What you lose when you break up a collection)

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Another visit by another Greek premier to London, another bout of speculation about the future of the Parthenon marbles, another poll showing that the British people are happy to see them shipped off to Athens, another slew of liberal commentators expressing with characteristic superficiality the view that the marbles “belong” in Greece, another failure by almost everyone to ask what might be lost if that were to happen.

Not that it constitutes much of an argument, but in fact the level of public support for the restitution of the marbles seems to have dropped by over 20% in the last decade, from 77% to 53%. It may be that this has something to do with the issue becoming yet another front in the culture wars, with Reform and its media boosters coupling the metopes in the British Museum with the fate of the Chagos islands. One result is a double irony in which the Right wants to charge people to see the marbles and the Left advocates free entry not to see them.

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Rojava is in Danger

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With Donald Trump set to return to the White House, the future of Rojava is in serious danger. The last Trump administration green-lit Turkey’s 2019 invasion, resulting in mass displacement, ethnic cleansing of Kurds, and a brutal occupation that continues to this day. Since then, Turkish President Erdogan has threatened to launch another such invasion but repeatedly failed to secure approval from the Biden administration. Reports of Erdogan’s conversation this week with his “friend” Donald Trump suggest that the tides could soon turn in his favor yet again, and another major invasion could be on the horizon.

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The Fields of Tanis (a reflection from Haiti)

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Dear Family and Friends,

The Haitian people are living through a fourth year of violent torment.

It is the tragic unravelling of the country, with vengeful political discord and the rule of gangs, keeping everything on a crash course.

Having been surrounded by gun battles for most of the past 7 days, and having helped many gunshot, traumatized, robbed, abused and humiliated people over these years, it is more than evident that a bullet easily destroys the whole person: body and mind, heart and soul.

So I had every sympathy for “Keket” yesterday when she, like so many, came to see me for any kind of help.

She was a strong, stocky market woman, in her sixties, until very recently when weakened by a stroke. Since so many clinics and hospitals have closed in the past years, Keket was “lost to follow up.” The whole country is lost to follow up. The whole country is sick in every sense.

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Democracy and Feelings: Yoko Tawada brings Paul Celan into the Age of Fiber Optics

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Review of Yoko Tawada, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, translated by Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions, 2024).

In retrospect, “bowling alone” ain’t even the worst of it.[1] At least then one retains a modicum of public interaction, an immunity-community[2] formed through the public choreography of shared shoes, balls, lanes. The AppStore at this moment boasts several games flouting “Bowling” and “3D” in their title, a rather perverse inversion of the textures of reality and its flattening by the culture of the screen. The increasing digitization of our live has ravaged social capital and concentrated private capital at a scale far exceeding what even Robert Putnam had in mind. We are becoming increasingly aware of just how devastatingly effective the pandemic of social loneliness—precipitated to hitherto unknown extremes by the COVID-era lockdowns—is for fostering political polarization and right-wing extremism.[3] During the COVID-era, our societies insisted that we remain isolated from one virus, even if that meant exposing us to the ills of whatever goes viral. Four years later, we’re still paying the price for pandemic populism.

In March 2021, I learned the lesson the hard way. It was the centenary of Paul Celan’s birth, and Pierre Joris—gifted poet and translator—was set to speak on his recently completed masterwork, a weighty two-volume translation of Celan’s collected poetry, replete with commentary. Being the dark days of the yet unrelenting pandemic, the talk was naturally on Zoom. Celan’s face loomed on the shared Powerpoint as I introduced Joris. No sooner had he thanked the organizers than it began: the n-word scrawled across the screen; a shrill cartoonish scream invading the speakers; rancid GIFS with gobs of semen extruded on co-eds’ expectant faces; and then, there it was: line by line, the swastika drawn in red ink over Celan’s face. It was thus that I—along with Joris, the other discussants, and the 50 some-odd people present for the talk—were made privy to the phenomenon known as Zoombombing.

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From “Standing Voiceless and other Stories of Resilience”

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Erella Dunayevsky’s stories evoke the dailiness of Palestinians’ lives under occupation. They take place over many years but, as Dunayevsky has written, “the essence of the stories is identical, whether they took place during the nineties of the previous century or are happening right now.” This next story comes very close to our time…

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“This Arab Activist in Israel Isn’t Afraid to Criticize Both Netanyahu and Hamas”

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Yuval Noah Harari recently pressed journalists to get representative voices from Israel’s Arab citizenry into mainstream discourse. There may be risks in promoting the notion that Israel is a relatively open society since the country has two tiers of citizenship. Yet it’s also true that 20 percent of Israel’s population is Arab. They may be the minority that can save Israel from itself, as Black people redeemed American democracy in the 50s and 60s by forcing the country to end segregation.

Your editor means to keep responding to Harari’s Call to center Palestinian voices, with a little help this time around from “Haaretz,” where the following piece was published earlier this month …
…

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Heart of Mine (An Introduction to Erella Dunayevsky’s “Standing Voiceless and other Stories of Resilience”)

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Before you, reader, are words of pain. Powerful words. Stories of connection.

Beloved Erella, my oldest and dearest friend, manages in these pages to meet people beyond boundaries, to create connections in places of deliberate separation and to hold out a compassionate hand beyond the limitations of the regime.

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Occupation and Resilience

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Erella Dunayevsky’s stories bring home what Daniela Kitain terms (above) “the daily reality of Palestinians’ lives under occupation.” What follows is Dunayevsky’s own letter to her readers and two of her urgent yet timeless stories. First of the Month will post more of Dunayevsky’s dispatches in upcoming months.
……….

Dear Reader,

The stories before you take place over many years.

Figures and places vary, but the essence of the stories is identical, whether they took place during the nineties of the previous century or are taking place right now.

The Hebrew language only has four tenses: past, present, future and imperative. I actually need more tenses, as there are in English for example – past continuous and present continuous – so that you, the reader, will correctly interpret the stories before you. They constitute one story about ongoing occupation. A glimpse into the souls who constantly experience it. Something that began to take place once and continues to take place into time unknown.

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Her Back Pages

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The back cover copy (translated into English by Noelle Canin and Erella Dunayevsky) from Dunayevsky’s Standing Voiceless and other Stories of Resilience.

“We parted. Jaber accompanied us. As we picked our way through the piles of earth resulting from the demolition on the mountainside, on our way to our car we’d parked on the main dirt road, Jabar suddenly stopped, bent down and pointed to the tiniest green plant forging its way through the collapse of stones and earth, saying: ‘This is a Za’atar sprout, it’s determined to live.’”

The collection of sketches in this book describe a journey of long-standing, intimate encounters with people who live under the unbearable reality of ongoing occupation.

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The Lost Generation

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C’est un peu, dans chacun de ces hommes, Mozart assassiné. 

I enter the hotel where Ricky has been staying since a few days after October 18 when she was forced to leave her house in Metula.  In that home next to the northern border of Israel she had been dealing with her Parkinsons’ with walks in the garden in the morning and the afternoon, grab bars in strategic places, meals provided by a local organization, and visits and deliveries from shops she has known for 50-odd years. Now she is in a small room far from the elevator and can’t make it to the dining room because there are some stairs she cannot manage.

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When Is Anti-Zionism Bigotry?

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October 7 approaches. Many Israelis will be lighting memorial candles on the anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel. The occasion will also be marked by anti-Zionist demonstrations all across the West. It’s been a year of rockets and drones, rhizomic tunnels, assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank, slaughter in Gaza and now Lebanon. A zeeser jahr—happy Jewish new year? I think not.

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