Max Blumenthal in St.Louis

Today we went to listen to Max Blumenthal present his new book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. He is a very good public speaker, extremely knowledgeable about his subject, and very passionate. I haven’t read the book yet but I most certainly will and I will post a review as soon as I’m done. What I liked is that Blumenthal didn’t do one of those weird readings where an author reads from his own book as if he were meeting a bunch of illiterates who can’t read for themselves. Instead, this author spoke in an unscripted way about his experiences in Israel as he was researching this book.

During the book-signing, I mentioned to the author that Russian-speaking immigrants both in Israel and in North America tend to go to the far far FAR Right in their efforts to fit in. Blumenthal responded that he noticed that, too. He obviously found it somewhat unusual to see people like me (Russian-speakers, I mean) at his book presentations and asked me what made me go in  different direction from members of my immigrant community.

I responded that for my post-Soviet brothers and sisters it is extremely difficult to adapt to life as immigrants. So they overcompensate for their incapacity to fit in by becoming ultra-conservative. Not that it does them much good and makes them feel more comfortable in their new countries because this need to please looks desperate and off-putting.

During the presentation, Blumenthal said that he was neither pro-Israel nor pro-Palestine. Instead, he was pro-human rights. This is a position I share completely and I’m as disturbed as Blumenthal is by the idea that an ethnic state is something that is worth defending.

“The greatest enemy of Israel today is democracy,” he said. From what I heard at this talk, this just might be true.

There weren’t many people at the talk, and Blumenthal shared that this was the smallest audience he had had so far for his presentation. Given that my students have no idea what the word ‘Jew’ even means, I’m not surprised.

I like to support independent local bookstores because I would hate for them to disappear, so I also bought Jeff Guinn’s new book on Manson. This means that several interesting reviews are coming soon to this blog.