Commentary

~ Clarissa

Now that I’ve seen Jewish jokes in my favorite new magazine Commentary, I know for a fact it’s a Jewish magazine. Trust me to grab a random magazine from a newsstand in Southern Illinois (not known for huge Jewish communities) and have that magazine be Jewish. 

It’s a really fun publication,  people,  I highly recommend. But only in case you don’t expect your reading matter to serve as an echo to your inner voice. Or, alternatively,  if you are reader el. 🙂

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Published by Clarissa

27 thoughts on “Commentary”

  2. Is this the magazine’s Internet site, or were you talking about another magazine?
    http://www.commentarymagazine.com/

    The “About Us” section sounds interesting.

    And not apologizing in the least for anything: “the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States, and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards.” 🙂

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    1. One of the professors who escaped from France shared that one of the reasons was the impossibility of visiting bookstores. They were subdivided into these identity categories that made it impossible to find anything. And identities competed for space and location according to the importance of their perceived marginalization.

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    2. The bookstore owner might have had better luck had they said “We don’t segregate authors by race”. or “We don’t pracice apartheid with authors of books”

      Or worse luck, frustrated do-gooders can be very unpredictable and dangerous.

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  6. Found this book’s name on Commentary site and googled:

    Robert Wistrich, Hebrew University professor of European and Jewish History and director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of anti-Semitism, has just published his 29th book titled From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews and Israel.
    […]
    He skillfully relates the connection of “the prefigured 19th century sea-bed of anti-Semitic socialism found in Marx, Fourier and Proudhon, extending through to the orthodox Communists and ‘non-conformist’ Trotskyites to the Islamo-leftist hybrids of today who systematically vilify the so called racist essence of the Jewish State.”
    […]
    His chapter on Leon Trotsky, entitled “A Bolshevik’s Tragedy,” […] Trotsky was ultimately forced by Stalin into assuming the traditional Jewish role in society and became reviled as the scapegoat for the failures of the Revolution.
    […]
    Wistrich asserts that Holocaust inversion, now a major component of the Left’s effort to besmirch Israel, while initially introduced by British historian Arnold Toynbee who referred to Zionists as “disciples of the Nazis,” was in fact institutionalized as the “Zionist- Nazi” nexus at the Prague Trials orchestrated from Moscow.

    http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Wistrich-on-the-Left-the-Jews-and-Israel

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    1. Marx wasn’t anti-semitic although he wrote “On the Jewish Question”. I think that what may turn out to be anti-semitic is reading too much into these European intellectuals’ views on issues pertaining to their time. For instance, if I appear in a text and thereby conclude, “this text is against me”, it creates an issue and a problem where there needn’t be one.

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      1. I don’t think he claims “Marx hated Jews,” but Marxist teachings did demand from Jews to cease to exist as a people to achieve the utopian goal of the ideal world, since it would’ve been the teachings’ logical result. Other larger peoples would’ve probably survived (as a people), but not Jews.

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      2. Btw, I don’t know whether today’s radical anti-Israeli Marxists ever use Marx to show how (only) Jewish desire for a national self-determination is a bad idea. They do use “you should’ve stayed in Europe” sometimes.

        Regarding the latter, I heard a curious story:

        I once visited a German forum in English, and in one of discussions about Israel, heard about the story told on German radio. How a former German Jew went to Israel (immediately after WW2), and saw a Palestinian sitting all day on the street and looking at his former shop with pain. The Jew decided he had no right to hurt others and returned to Germany. An Israeli Jew on the forum explained why it couldn’t have happened this way, btw. But what is important is the psychological function of those stories for Germans. I named them “fables for the feeble-minded” or FF.

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        1. I’m also the victim of historical chaos — regime change and diaspora. I have been consistently attacked by the left and right. Nobody is friendly to me. But I find the more I fight against this reality the more I sink — like drowning in quicksand.

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        2. The idea of the nation state – any nation state – is deeply alien to a Marxist. Nationalism is a dried moldy crust the cynical rich throw to the deluded poor in order to rob them that much easier.

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  7. // One of the professors who escaped from France shared that one of the reasons was the impossibility of visiting bookstores. They were subdivided into these identity categories that made it impossible to find anything.

    Thought about it while reading:

    “The transvestite poet’s brand of anger—at once dishonest, superficial, and intense—marks several other of the city’s writing groups, which constitute themselves according to an extra-literary sense of grievance. There are women writers’ groups, lesbian writers’ groups, black women writers’ groups (“We are twice slaves,/ The slaves of slaves”), Indian women writers’ groups, and even a disabled writers’ group (“You think we cannot think like you/ Because we cannot walk like you”). Writing and reading are not attempts to grasp imaginatively the complexity of the world, to tease out moral ambiguities, or to enter the experience of others, but a primitive tribal ritual of solidarity, a raising of the drawbridges against the hostile aliens who do not share one defining attribute or another.

    Our bookshops precisely mirror this balkanization of literary endeavor, with their black writing sections, gay and lesbian writing sections, women’s writing sections, and so forth. You do not read to broaden your outlook or your sympathies but to maintain your rage—to quote Gough Whitlam’s advice to his supporters, after he had been dismissed as prime minister of Australia. For in an era of victimhood, when even the most privileged feel themselves hard done by, rage is automatically deemed a generous and justified emotion, no matter what the special pleading upon which it is founded.”
    http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_1_oh_to_be.html

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    1. What’s been happening recently is that I go into a bookstore and stand there for 15 minutes like an idiot trying to figure out which of the author’s identities the workers at this particular store have chosen as the salient identity.

      The funny part is that I never guess correctly.

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  8. musteryou and Clarissa, you may like “How to Read a Society” article about “a work by a nineteenth-century French aristocrat, the Marquis de Custine” who “analyzed Russian society by reference to the psychology of the individuals who made it up.”

    “On reading La Russie en 1839, the exiled Alexander Herzen declared it the best book ever written on the subject and lamented that only a foreigner could have written it.”

    The parallels between czarist Russia and future communist state sounded convincing to me.
    http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_2_urbanities-how_to_read.html

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      1. \\ I totally need to move De Custine to my Classics Club list.

        Glad you liked him.

        If you read, have you liked this article by THEODORE DALRYMPLE?
        I liked the first part (about Custine) more than the second, in which he connects between Alexis de Tocqueville and modern British society.

        From the article:

        ” Another traveler, Custine’s younger, but more eminent and scholarly, contemporary, Alexis de Tocqueville, took with him the same methods and the same assumption that no society can be understood without reference to the psychology of its members, and he famously produced classic accounts both of America and Britain. “

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  9. A short quote from Custine’s work that I liked:

    Unlike so many gullible intellectuals of the twentieth century who visited communist countries in the spirit of religious pilgrims, Custine understood only too well both the techniques and the meaning of the attempts to deceive him. “Russian hospitality, bristling with formalities . . . is a polite pretext for hampering the movements of the traveller and limiting his license to observe […] Thanks to this fastidious politeness, the observer cannot visit a place or look at anything without a guide; never being alone he has trouble judging for himself, which is what they want. To enter Russia, you must deposit your free will as well as your passport at the frontier. . . . .” No wonder, he added, that “the most highly esteemed travellers are those who, the most meekly and for the longest time, allow themselves to be taken in.” No visitor to a communist country could fail to recognize the description.

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    1. ““Russian hospitality, bristling with formalities . . . is a polite pretext for hampering the movements of the traveller and limiting his license to observe […] Thanks to this fastidious politeness, the observer cannot visit a place or look at anything without a guide; never being alone he has trouble judging for himself, which is what they want. To enter Russia, you must deposit your free will as well as your passport at the frontier. . . . .” No wonder, he added, that “the most highly esteemed travellers are those who, the most meekly and for the longest time, allow themselves to be taken in.””

      – Wow, I wish all of the facile Western idiots who traveled to the USSR and then sang its praises had read this first. Not that it would have changed their minds about anything at all, of course.

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