Judaism

Recent Reading

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Four mini-reviews in this batch:

—Splendid Solution, by Jeffrey Kluger
—Red Plenty, Francis Spufford
—Instruments of Darkness, Alfred Price
—The Scarlet Thread, Mandy Rice-Davies

Splendid Solution is about the development of the Salk polio vaccine. The book gives a vivid picture of the devastation wrought by epidemics with no vaccines and without meaningful treatments, both the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic and the successive polio epidemics, and the public health measures used in attempts to control such epidemics.  It describes how the Salk vaccine was developed, some of the conflicts among scientists, and the vaccine rollout, including media reactions and early manufacturing problems.  Very interesting reading, especially in the light of our present vaccine situation and controversies.

Red Plenty is about Soviet economic planning, as seen from the inside.  (I’ve reviewed it previously here, but recently re-read it in conjunction with an online book discussion group.)  It’s part fiction and part factual history: the characters include factory managers, economic planners, mathematicians, computer scientists, and “fixers.” Very well-written and also well-researched and footnoted.

Instruments of Darkness is about electronic warfare during WWII, primarily on the European front but also touching on the Pacific war.  Covers ‘the battle of the beams,’ in which Britain attempted to interfere with the radio guidance system used by the Germans to support night bombing, and the jamming and spoofing which was directed at communications between night fighters and their ground controllers.

The author was himself an electronics warfare officer with the RAF during the war, so speaks from a position of knowledge.

A Scarlet Thread is a historical novel about Israeli settlements in what was then called Palestine, at the time of the First World War.  Faced with increasing exactions and depredations by the Turkish rulers, a group of Jews resolve to support the British war effort by providing intelligence information–if they can find anyone in the British government who is willing to accept such information and take it seriously, that is.

The author became famous (or infamous) as one of the two women involved in the Profumo sex scandal of 1963-64, which brought down Prime Minister Macmillan and the Conservative government.  She married an Israeli, moved to Israel, and converted to Judaism–this book (published in 1989) is a pretty decent historical novel, not just an attempt at capitalizing on her celebrity.

 

 

 

Across the Great Divide

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Peter Watson, The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013)

As my reviews tend to do, this one will highlight some negatives, but which I will get out of the way early on. Peter Watson is a highly successful author and journalist who has rather more than dabbled in archaeology along the way. I am … somewhat less of an authority. Nonetheless, The Great Divide is kind of a mess, but one that ends up being sufficiently thought-provoking to be worth the effort.

Fun stuff first—shout-out to Jim Bennett for recommending the book; and here are my ideas for relevant musical interludes while reading the following:

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Quote of the Day

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Dennis Prager, quoting and expanding on Bret Stephens’s explanation of how the New York Times could come to publish an obviously anti-Jewish cartoon:

“The reason is the almost torrential criticism of Israel and the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism, including by this paper, which has become so common that people have been desensitized to its inherent bigotry. So long as anti-Semitic arguments or images are framed, however speciously, as commentary about Israel, there will be a tendency to view them as a form of political opinion, not ethnic prejudice. But as I noted in a Sunday Review essay in February, anti-Zionism is all but indistinguishable from anti-Semitism in practice and often in intent, however much progressives try to deny this.”
 
Exactly right. As I wrote in “Why the Jews? The Reason for Anti-Semitism” 40 years before Stephens wrote his column, there is no difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Of course, one can criticize Israel, just as one can criticize any country, but that is not anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism is not criticism of Israel. It is a hatred of Israel — a hatred greater than that of any other country and a delegitimization of Zionism, the movement to reestablish the Jewish national home. Imagine someone who argued that the establishment of the Italian state — Italy — was illegitimate and who hated Italy more than any other country in the world yet claimed that he was in no way anti-Italian, as he had Italian friends and loved Italian culture. No one would believe such an absurdity.

The New Party Line

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So, as of this last week, as per the sparkly new members of the House, the Democrat Party line is now one of unapologetic and hard-line anti-Semitism. Not that this should surprise anyone with a grounding in history: in the 19th century, the Democrat Party was the party of slavery and secession, in the 20th, the party of segregation and Jim Crow. And now, in this faintly-tarnished 21st, they appear to have become the party of socialism, anti-Semitism, and the fanatical belief that OMG-The-Planet-Earth-Is-Gonna-Fry!
The Horrendous Climate Change thing is bad enough on its’ own. Look, I have been paying attention long enough to remember when Massive Global Cooling was all the Panic du jour, then followed by the Massive Global Warming – all this human and/or industrial caused. I am so not falling for the scam of the successor to this panic – that of Massive Global Climate Change!!Eleventy!! It was warm enough in Roman times to grow wine grapes in England, warm enough in Medieval times for subsistence farming in Greenland, cold enough in the 17th centuries that the Thames froze over at London, enabling midwinter jollities to be held on the ice. The monumental Cliff Dweller settlements in the American Southwest flowered and flourished until the thirteenth century, when widespread drought and subsequent unrest drove the Anasazi from their aeries among the cliffs. The volcanic explosion of Mt. Tambora in 1815 in the East Indies brought about the following “year with no summer” in the northern European continent and the eastern US – all this when industry was in infancy and automobiles a dream in the mind of whatever madman was doing science fiction at the time… so, not buying anthropogenic global warming or the Green New Deal for a hot second.

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The Two Minutes Hate is Being Indefinitely Extended

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Atlantic writer Franklin Foer:

Any strategy for enhancing the security of American Jewry should involve shunning Trump’s Jewish enablers. Their money should be refused, their presence in synagogues not welcome. They have placed their community in danger.

I wonder if Franklin Foer has been equally vehement in denouncing the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic harassment on American university campuses, or the ongoing relationship of prominent Democrats with Louis Farrakhan, or the attempted political murders of Steve Scalise and others. After Nancy Pelosi said “I just don’t even know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country,”  did he call for the shunning of Pelosi contributors?

Saturday, from a journalist named Julia Loffe:

And a word to my fellow American Jews: This president makes this possible. Here. Where you live. I hope the embassy move over there, where you don’t live was worth it.

So she thinks the US should establish its foreign policy to ensure against a possible violent reaction from any of the worst criminals, crazies, and thugs in the country?  That is an equation with no solutions, and her foregoing tweet doesn’t strike me as even being sane.

Also Saturday, journalist Salena Zito was confronted by a reporter for the Guardian:

In middle of a somber moment at staging area while I was talking to a member of the Jewish community this @guardian reporter started screaming at me that I was an anti-Semite/that I caused shooting because I reports on Trump  & to leave and kept screaming in my face to get out.

“Progressives” often accuse Trump supporters of being “haters”, but it should be obvious that many of the Progs are themselves filled with hate and rage to a frightening degree.

John Podhoretz:

Based on the early evidence, the shooter was not only consumed with a hatred of Jews but possessed a kind of sneering contempt for Trump on the grounds that Trump was basically a Jewish agent or a Jew-lover himself. Trump can only be blamed for the murderous Jew-killing actions of someone who thought of him that way by people who are so consumed by hatred of him that there is nothing they won’t blame him for.

It has even been asserted that Soros is shorthand for the Jews, and anyone who has said anything about him (presumably he means said anything negative about him) has blood on their hands.  (I suspect that the people making these claims are mostly the same people who object vehemently to “big money in politics.”)

Masha Merkulova, who came to the US from the Soviet Union:

Not a week goes by that I don’t hear about university professors who are concerned about openly identifying as Zionist for fear of being punished in their professional lives; or college students who worry about their grades and social lives if they object to their professors’ anti-Israel words and actions; or teens whose teachers are outwardly anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, or whose classmates draw a swastika next to their name.

Yet this sort of thing seems to be of little interest to most prominent journalists, “intellectual” writers, activist-entertainers, etc…most probably because it can’t be used as a hammer to beat up on their favorite targets.

Much of the Left today seems absolutely blinded by hate. (For one more example, see the disruption of a moment of silence for the Pittsburgh victims, at a Marsha Blackburn event in Tennessee.)  As the election approaches, I am convinced that it’s important to keep these people as far away as possible from the levers of power.  The assertions that there should be a prohibition against criticism of George Soros seems like a clear indicator that the Left, if they had the power, would like to treat this as a Reichstag Fire moment to shut down speech and political activity of which they don’t approve.